Event: Healing Waters

[voidtreckermods]

"Good morning passengers, it is day twenty three of the month of Grasshopper. All passengers of the Voidtrecker Express require rest. Next stop Jema’grethy Island. All passengers prepare to disembark."

It is a very strange morning message that rings through the train on the morning of day twenty three but as the passengers of the Voidtrecker Express wake their screens glow with the colour of the void and a holographic screen pops up for them to read.

World #2554098133741: A world once inhabited by an ancient civilisation and now preserved as a historical site, nature reserve and well-being retreat. It is famous for its relaxing hot springs, calming atmosphere and beautiful beaches.

It is a popular void-traveller destination, particularly among void missionaries as a place to rest and recuperate after difficult missions.

The Voidtrecker Express will spend three days here, arriving today and leaving on day twenty six of the month of Grasshopper. The dressing carriage is open for your convenience.

It is time for a holiday it seems!

Preparation

For those who go to explore the dressing carriage they will find a variety of beachwear and wetsuits. One cupboard has a pile of tents and groundsheets in all four team colours.

One cabinet is exclusively filled with beach towels, in a kaleidoscope of colours, designs and patterns. Another is filled with different shapes and sizes of plain towel dressing gowns. There is even a cabinet with buckets, spades and small rock-pooling nets.

It seems they are in for quite an adventure.

Arrival

"Shortly arriving on World #2554098133741. Exit from void in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one."

The train lurches and rattles as it leaves the void they will get a glimpse of silver-purple sky and a beautiful ocean below.

However some passengers might be a little more than distracted, one staring at that table for a second too long, another seeming lost in thought for a couple of seconds, a longer than normal pause in a sentence. They see a vision, a glimpse of a life that is not their own. Not all at once, but here and there as the train descends to the island.

But then it is gone and things are back to normal. Just in time, as they come to land.

Jema’grethy Island

The train has landed on a grassy ridge, overlooking a beautiful beach of white sand and the ocean beyond. It is warm, but not too hot, a cool ocean breeze cutting through the heat making it pleasant. Behind them is a grassy plain, changing to forest in the distance. There is the sound of birdsong in the purple sky. To the west the land is more craggy, the silhouette of a fortress in the distance. In a word, it is idylic. A sense of peace permeates the island.

A little more worrying is the volcano-like structure in the north. But even a quick glance will show it is not a typical volcano. There is no smoke and the liquid slowly running down it in rivulets is pink and blue.

Exploring the passengers will find beautiful beaches, ragged cliffs to walk and caves to explore. Where it is more craggy the beaches are made of pebbles- perfect for rock pooling.

The place has no people, but it is clearly maintained. The eastern beaches have racks of shallow boats, both canoes and one- or two-person sailing dinghies. There is also a small building in which scuba gear is stored, along with several waterproofed manuals and instructional literature.

Ruins of ancient houses are scattered across the island, but the main settlement is built into a rocky section in the north-west that has been secured with ropes and stairways cut into the cliffs, perfect for scrambles and hikes.

There are no living quarters, but there are sheltered sections with basic toilet facilities marked as camping grounds in five different sections of the island - by the hot springs, within the ruined fortress, beside the harbour, on the eastern beaches, and on the northern face of the mountain.

Hot Springs

To the west are the hot springs. They have both outdoor and indoor areas; the indoor areas being wooden loghouse saunas, changing rooms and storage sheds, whilst the outdoor areas are a tiered series of pools spilling down the side of the mountain and shaded by brightly flowering trees. The waters are hot, mineral-rich and soothing.

Perfect for overly stressed, world weary Void heroes...

(OOC: More setting information is here, please feel free to go wild with the setting and have a fun and relaxing time. You can use this post as a catch all for your holiday or make your own posts on middleofsomewhere. More information about how the memory event is structured is here!)

Comments

Beach

[10billionpercent]

By the time Senku came across Dyme, he'd already outfitted himself with a stone axe and a stone knife that was hanging from a makeshift rope belt off of his cargo pants. He'd also torn up one of his t-shirts to make wrist bracers, meaning he's been busy.

"Find any interesting shells?" He asked, a lot less interested in the pretty ones and more what they were made of.

A source of calcium carbonate would not be amiss.

[swansongs]

Looking up, Dyme smiled. "A few, I think," he said, poking through the shells he was holding onto. "Like, this one's pink." He held it up, and it was indeed pink and a little glossy.

"Most of the others are kind of bland." But still pretty enough, just not as colorful.

[10billionpercent]

"I wonder what they're made of." He was a lot less interested in what colour they were, or what they looked like, and more interested in the chemical compound that made up the shells.

To each their own, perhaps.

[swansongs]

"I dunno." he blinked down at the shells in his hands, mulling it over. "Whatever shells are usually made of, I guess? Or not, considering where we are. I don't even know what shells are made of to start with."

[10billionpercent]

"Calcium carbonate, typically." Senku answered, and hopefully he wanted to actually know.

"Also known as lime if that's more familiar to you. The stuff they use to chalk fields for playing sports in the modern world."

[swansongs]

It was a good thing Senku clarified, because off the top of his head Dyme had no idea what calcium carbonate was, besides seashells, apparently.

"Oh! Okay, gotcha. I thought they used like, some kind of paint for the fields." But he wasn't into sports, and he was trying really hard not to think of lime the fruit.

[10billionpercent]

Senku knew a lot of people who wouldn't know that, or anything else he got excited about, really.

"No, it's a wildly useful chemical compound with at least three important uses." Senku said with a bit of a grin.

"You can mix it with sand to make mortar, which is like cement. You can also use it to lower the acidity of soil for agricultural purposes, and perhaps more importantly, you can use it to make soap."

[swansongs]

"Huh. That's really neat. I knew exactly none of that." And now he'd learned new things, which wasn't exactly a rare occurrence; there was a lot he didn't know about.

After a moment, he added, "So...does soil acidity hurt plants or something?"

[10billionpercent]

"Science is my passion." Senku answered, and he couldn't help but explain things like this, like it was a compulsion so talking to him for any length of time was likely to lead to a wealth of information that no one asked for.

"It doesn't hurt the plants, exactly, but it makes it extremely difficult to cultivate crops that way. The more acidic the soil, the least likely you are to get a successful yield. A balanced, neutral pH produces much better crops. In short, they don't like acid."

[swansongs]

"Music's mine," Dyme said. "I've never been much of a science person." Which wasn't to say he disliked it, just that he was bad at learning it.

"And I didn't know science was part of farming. And stuff." Actually, he had no idea what went into farming and crops and plants. He didn't even have a house plant. "I guess I'm learning things today."

[10billionpercent]

"Science is a part of everything." Senku replied easily. "Science is basically how you get answers about the world around you."

He honestly couldn't help himself when it came to sharing knowledge, it was so ingrained in his day to day he didn't even think about it. "If it helps, it can be valuable knowledge to have in the most impossible seeming of situations."

Senku looked thoughtful a moment. "I don't know much about music. I know it exists, of course, and that people enjoyed it, but I suppose if we're discussing expertise, I'd be below a beginner." Music wasn't really on his radar.

[swansongs]

"Right. Like, I know science is important, I just...I was a shitty student," he admitted. He wasn't as ashamed of it as he used to be. And besides, he'd still done alright with his life, even if he'd never properly graduated high school or gone to college.

"But, I was never shitty about music. It's my career, and I love it. Of course, I haven't been able to do much here, or anything, really, but." He shrugged. He was getting by, at least.

[10billionpercent]

If it made Dyme feel better, Senku didn't finish high school either.

"Ah, that's a matter of perspective. I'm fairly certain my lit teachers would all call me a nightmare." Senku quipped with a bit of a smirk. "Art...I refused to participate in gym class."

"In my defense if a formula fits in with the beats of a haiku it should be completely admissible as valid poetry."

He looked like he was thinking for a moment. "What is stopping you from performing here?"

[swansongs]

He laughed. "Man, haikus are hard. Any way you can make one work would count to me," he said. But he guessed not everyone agreed with that.

"Nothing, really," he replied, shrugging. "I've got a guitar and stuff, I just worry about bothering people, I guess. Like, everyone's stuck here, right? If they don't like my music there aren't many places to go." Except a different car if they were on the train at the time, which would probably work.

[10billionpercent]

He let out a genuine laugh of delight at that. "That's how I feel about it! I don't want to spend my time writing dumb poetry for school, there are far more important things to think about!"

"Hm." He mused thoughtfully. "Well aside from the fact maybe soundproofing yourself somewhere, if you want to perform for people it might be better to organize something more formal. I don't know much about music management, or music at all. It's nice and all, I guess, but it wasn't something I listened to that much."

He paused. "Which is pretty funny, because it sounds like my dad married a pop star."

[swansongs]

"I hated just writing in general for school." Which was maybe funny since he wrote a lot of his own songs now. But writing for school and writing for yourself were two very different things.

"Yeah, I was thinking about doing something like that, putting on a performance sometime. But I dunno how interesting me and a guitar would be." An acoustic at that, not even an electric.

Tilting his head to the side, he added, "Were you not...close with your dad, or something?" How else could someone not know for sure what one of their parents was doing?

[10billionpercent]

He could write formulas all day long, but having to read and analyze a book? No thank you. Senku had never once enjoyed that aspect of his education, nor did he think much about how it held him back from achieving what he wanted to. He was a good student, when he applied himself, he could (and did) get the marks, but it had always seemed like a waste of time.

Senku shrugged again at that, he doesn't know the ins and outs of performing music and he won't even try to advise Dyme on that.

"No, we were close." Senku responded. "It's just that after I turned to stone, because he was in space, he didn't and he lived out the rest of his natural life while I was petrified. From Ruri's tales, it sounds like he married Lillian Weinberg, which makes enough sense I guess, since he texted me a picture of them together, he probably liked her."

[swansongs]

People were so casual about some things. Just dropping lines like 'after I turned to stone' like it was no big deal.

Dyme stared at him for a moment. "Hold on a second. You were turned to stone? How do you come back from being stone?" Also, it sounded like it'd lasted a long time, if someone had managed to live out the rest of their life while it was happening.

[10billionpercent]

It wasn't necessarily that, so much as Senku wasn't really thinking about who he was speaking to and more likely, that they were unaware of the entire thing. He had a habit of his mind running all over the place sometimes, so trivial facts like that didn't seem important.

"Yeah, when I was sixteen all of humanity was petrified in June and remained that way for over 3700 years. I was petrified for 117,354,893,870 seconds exactly." Senku again quoted this as though it was unremarkable. "How I broke free is a bit of an interesting scientific fact! I remained alert and thinking the entire time so I was consuming energy from within the stone, so with that in mind, and a fortunate break that nitric acid was coming into contact with my petrified self, I happened to break free on April 1st, 5738."

"For most people though, it's more like a cold sleep so to mitigate the lack of generated energy, the revival fluid I came up with has alcohol in the mix, making it a much stronger version of the previously sold industrial nital etch, but it works."

[swansongs]

Anything that was particularly scientific went sailing over Dyme's head. So did the long string of numbers for how many seconds had passed.

"I would've lost my mind if I was stone for that long and aware of it the whole time," he said.

"Also, that is a ridiculously long time," he added. "What caused all of that?" It sounded like a horrible, terrifying thing to have gone through.

[10billionpercent]

"I suppose, but I was lucky I didn't." Whether or not that was true was sometimes debatable honestly, but he wasn't exactly self aware on that point. "I just counted, so I could tell how much time had passed. Nasty calculation, that."

He brightened at the question. "That's the question isn't it? I have a few theories, and we've gotten our hands on a device that does the same thing, so I can only hypothesize that it was one of these - we're calling it the Medusa - that caused the petrification!" He was more excited about the unknown tech than anything else.

"Also, we're pretty sure the signal to activate it is coming from the moon, so that's definitely our next project."

[swansongs]

"I bet." He couldn't imagine keeping count for that long, even if it was something to focus on to maybe stay sane. Or something.

"Medusa," he repeated, "Like that old myth?" Which he vaguely knew about, at least. Something, something, woman with snakes for hair, something about stone and a beheading.

"Wait, so like. Do you think there are aliens on the moon doing this, or other people?"

[10billionpercent]

"Yeah. It amuses me even if it amuses no one else. We also named our ship Perseus, as in the man who defeated Medusa." Senku clearly appreciated the kind of humour that involved Greek mythology.

"Ah, well, that could be one theory, but based on the response we got from calling it out, I'm more tempted to think it's an AI. I have so many questions."

[swansongs]

That seemed very fitting to Dyme. Maybe not amusing, but definitely fitting.

"An AI?" He repeated. "Why would an AI do something like this?" Not that he had a lot of experience with AIs. Which was to say, he had zero experience. He could think of a lot of reasons to dislike people, but weren't AIs supposed to be...factual and level headed or something?

[10billionpercent]

"Another very good question. I don't expect we'll know until we get up there and investigate. Or, perhaps, we'll get a clue from the Medusa." Senku hummed thoughtfully.

"I'm not entirely sure it was an attack either, it's really complicated, it could've been meant as a reset, but we're planning for an antagonist, because at worst, we'll plan too much and not need to take action."