voidtreckerexpress | We're all in this train-gether 🚂

Who: OTA. If you’re a passenger with a ticket on this train, then you are most welcome here!
Where: Upper Music Car
When: Imagination 18, at around brunch.
What: Welcome to the train’s first ever community open forum. Come for the food, stay for the best discussions ever.
Warnings: Lots of top-levels for easy access to relevant topics to your characters, but apart from that, nothing right now! (Not a warning but a heads-up that one TL will be dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of the bonus trek during the last mission. For your OOC reference, please see here.)

Someway through the 18th of Imagination, an announcement for the already spoken for meeting is shared by the ICPs, giving people twenty minutes to come to the upper Music Carriage for the gathering. While the chairs mostly face the stage, they’ve been curved to allow people to face their fellow passengers too, so not to put the sole focus in one place.

This is a meeting for all, and everyone will have their chance to speak and be heard.

The promised snack table sits to one side of the room, and on the stage, the white board from the standard coach has been brought in, written on it bullet points for the planned topics. To assist in the flow of discussion, familiar moderators stand in place to help jot things down, carry conversation further should one idea end while another is ready to begin, among other such administrative tasks to organize the forum. Plus, the ICP’s are in constant use all throughout the meeting, with basic announcements about what’s being discussed now, and how more people are still welcome to catch up to the Music Car if they hear something that interests them.

Grab a plate, settle down, and let’s get to work.

(OOC: Specific top-levels will be set-up for ease of tagging. Select ‘Show Top-Level Comments Only’ if you would like to skip ahead! And as much as possible kindly keep to a single thread in that TL, unless a very special or private point has to be made with regards to the subject! :) Of course if you will be tagging the snacks table, the extra suggestions, or the meta-thread, this does not apply any longer.

Also, very important: Please see here for an example format of how documentation of missions can go! It is most relevant during the discussion on information gathering.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Nita nods, knowing probably more than Roland would like about what it was like to want to use those last words a certain way.

Make them count, make a difference. But Captain Halo didn't need to be a wizard to have power - respect - all her own, and her message was vital.]

I know what- what it's like to watch someone die...

[She shakes her head, eyes closing, and sighs. Roland's right in that there's more to it.]

But her SCA was left behind - just that? Nothing else?

[No clothes, nothing of her ship - why just what had tethered her? ~~And why were those devices so silent?~~]

Nothing. Just the SCA.

[ He discards the pastry, attempts to lick some of its remnants clean off his hands and fingers, but he's dazed still, recalling a memory like picking at an open wound just about ready to heal over. Roland's voice remains as steady as ever, but it sounds hollow. Tired. ]

Her ship, the Voidflash was wrecked beyond repair. Barely anything salvageable. And that meant - [ He swallows thickly. ] that meant no matter what her injuries were, she was doomed to die. [ Roland meets Nita's eye, expression heavy, the lilt in his voice rising to a degree of impassioned. ] So it's the same for us. We're as connected to this train as Captain Halo was to her ship, and it's the reason why we come back from the dead. It's why we can't hurt the train. Why we can't, ever. Because we'll all disappear. Forgotten. As if we were never here at all.

[ Nothing about him betrays how he feels. The tension in his shoulders, or how he's forgotten about the sticky pastry he's demolished in one hand. ]

[Nita grimaces. And here, if only for her sister's sake, she'd been hoping some machines would have survived the carnage. It really isn't fair, in so many ways.]

The tether being key, that makes sense - but I don't know if the train is anchoring us in memory. We still don't know where people go when they take to the barriers, after all.

Or what's happening in our worlds, come to that.

[Nita braces herself on a chair, trying to let her tension drain.]

Edited 2020-12-12 18:46 (UTC)

Nobody remembered her.

[ He's too jaded, to set in his own ways. He finally decides to wipe his hands on a stray napkin by the table, apologizing in silence as the pastry is all but forgotten even as he destroys it, never to be eaten. ]

In her final message, she said that when she came out of what seemed to be a regular void storm, everyone who should have recognized her, didn't. She checked the coordinates. She said she wasn't in an alternate. But in the end, the void ministry, the planets she's had contact with before, all of them saw her and didn't know who she was. As if she had been erased.

[ It's here that he finally feels the tremble in his hand, the one resting on his lap. But for the most part, he keeps his face steady. His eyes are ablaze, a gaze that could set the whole car on fire. ]

She wanted to be remembered. That was her only request. [ Roland narrows his eyes, a grimace forming on his lips. Guilt. Guiltguiltguilt - ] And for us to stay away from the void ministry. If we aren't recognized, then we'll be hunted down to conform to their standards, whatever it might be. I won't endanger the people on this train more than they already are. I won't -

[ It's coming out as gibberish. Roland doesn't expect Nita to know what he's been doing since Jema'grethy. Leaving messages, at first to his closest loved ones, and then evolving into calls for help. Signals to get them home. But if the ministry did anything to the train...then all of them would...

He's a fool.

Roland stays quiet. ]

Something happened to Enrara, that's for sure.

[The whole system, at that.]

We will. We'll remember her, and find out as much as we can about the Voidtrecker Express's homeworld to remember them, too.

[As Roland breaks down, Nita moves on in to hug him, like before. No pastries, just hugs.]

[ He doesn't know how to take the embrace, so Roland can only sit there in silence to accept it, feel the warmth from Nita as she offers it freely. He can barely hear his own words, an empty echo as it passes through a jumbled mind and a broken heart. ]

I don't think you quite understand. It can't end there. Remembering is one thing. It's the least we could do. But...

[ Roland closes his eyes, a grimace forming on his lips. Nita will feel him tense. At his worst, he clams up, can't will his tongue to wag the things he wants to say. He's closing up, walls high, hardened and upset.

There. That's the word for it. A quiet, raging storm. Roland is upset. ]

...Our lives are connected to this thing and we didn't even get to decide for ourselves. [ Roland scoffs out a dry laugh, nothing pleasant about it. ] At least Captain Halo wanted to be a void agent. She got to choose.

[ And what of them? Nothing. No choice to be had. Just comply like dumb subjects. Roland the king stripped of the only power he had left in his arsenal - his agency, and his desire to save the people he cares about the most. ]

[And at that? A few things click into place.

What was once a choice made in anger, now seems a possible reasonable path, even vital...

If Roland looks up, there's a different look in Nita's eyes, now. A colder one, but not for him.]

I may have an... equalizer. We don't have to physically hurt the train - and risk hurting ourselves - to try and make it understand what it's doing is wrong.

[ He does indeed meet her eye, but he doesn't know what to make of it. Not yet. But his brows furrow, and the tension doesn't leave his limbs even as Nita stays close. ]

What are you planning, Nita?

A way to channel the train.

[She's tried clamping onto it - and, she hates to think of it, has probably traumatized it even more - but maybe forming a place like the 'cave' in Jema'grethy could be a proper meeting ground.]

It's off in its own head, keeping itself apart from us on purpose - but if I brought it somewhere, a neutral place where it couldn't immediately pull back again...

[She's leaving the concept open, somewhat - she'd definitely have to talk about this with Dairine and S'reee, for one - but it'll give them all a project, a way to channel their anger that doesn't lead to explosions, or unwise psychotropic wizardries.]

We're all in this train-gether 🚂

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