middleofsomewhere | Event: Healing Waters

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Event: Healing Waters

"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!)

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"That does sound fitting, somehow- ah, do I have your name? I'm Nita," she said, belatedly realizing she hadn't asked any of the newcomers yet.

Hopefully Senku hadn't been here that long; otherwise Nita had no excuse.

Pausing to finish her toast, she then replied, "Well, half the problem isn't here; apparently a lot of it's to do with inconsistent manufacturers..."

Lack of pockets was only the tip of the iceberg.

He hadn't been there terribly long, just over a month so it wasn't that surprising, he was more of a reclusive thinker anyway.

"Ishigami Senku." He answered. "Senku's fine." He waved his hand dismissively.

"That sounds like a problem with the tailor then." He concluded with a bit of a nod. "Sounds highly inefficient, you'd think a gifted tailor could manage standard sizing. I wasn't aware there was such a problem." It's an interesting tidbit, actually, that can now sit in his knowledge reserves. "Yuzuriha never mentioned anything like that." He'd like to think he'd know that for sure, but maybe he didn't always listen to her with his full attention.

"Then again, she's good at what she does." He selected a pair of green swimming trunks and held it up. It looked like it would fit him so he shrugged slightly.

"Senku, then," Nita accepted with a nod - and then:

"Consumer culture," Nita said disparagingly.

"Usually code for 'it's all mass-produced to make you feel inadequate, unless you spend a lot of money.' Where's Yuzuriha from, then?"

Probably not the world Nita's used to!

"I understand. Mass production, cutting corners to increase profits, very common in the modern world." Senku said agreeing with her.

"Ah, the same place as me, Tokyo. We were classmates together and she's probably destined to marry my best friend if they ever get around to settling their ridiculous romantic notions." He sounded entirely too bored about that.

"But she's in charge of my craft team and she's insanely skilled at things like clothing production. She's made a lot of clothes out of linen as of late, as a byproduct of our balloon project."

The only part of that that he sounds terribly interested in? The balloon project.

Nita was happy enough to change subjects.

"Marry? Seriously?" Not that she didn't know couples like that herself - and, more importantly:

"Sounds a bit like Charlotte here, then. Though, what balloon project?"

"He's been in love with her for 3700 years, it's not like he's jumping the gun or anything, besides with the future how it is, there's nothing more than saying you're married anyway. I was even married for like three minutes." Senku answered, as though that wouldn't invite so many questions.

"Ah! Glad you asked. We constructed a hot air balloon, the basket was wicker which was fairly easy to rig up and then we used flax to make thread and Yuzuriha made the fabric and we used a wood burning stove to get the heat. Fortunately I've got myself a very experienced captain at my disposal!"

"... I hate to ask, but how long have you been alive? And how does that add up, maturity-speaking."

Because sometimes the two definitions were very different.

She didn't ask about Senku himself being married; somehow that was less surprising. ~~Look, you get accidentally married to your partner five times on five different worlds! Cultural standards can be a hell of a trip.~~

"Kind of an old-fashioned way to fly, isn't it? But still cool," she admitted with a smile.

"That's a complicated question. It depends on what you consider to be being alive. If you mean my consciousness and thought processes, my brain has been functioning for just shy of 3739 years, but I was petrified for 3719 years, minus nine weeks. So if you're looking for something more attuned to how my physical body has aged, I'm nearly twenty." Senku offered, doing his best to explain the circumstances of his age.

He didn't expand on it, although it was an amusing story, but he's very much more interested in the balloon.

"And yet it is the cutting edge of technology at the moment! Never let it be said that studying the history of anything is a waste of time." Those were words of wisdom, truly.

Edited (I was off my count, I'm not as smart as Senku XD) 2020-08-16 22:39 (UTC)

That... got a little more than just an eyebrow-rise out of Nita.

"You were conscious, in stasis, for over 3700 years?!"

She shook her head. "Hell of a story, that."

But if it wasn't what Senku wanted to talk about, she could understand.

"Rewriting all the history books, huh? Or recreating them."

You didn't have to tell her twice that history was important! Despite the occasional urge to smash people's heads together...

"Yeah. I counted to 117,354,893,870 seconds. How else would I know what the date was? I can partition my brain. Trick I picked up when I was a kid. Every spring I tried to focus on breaking through the petrification, because if it wasn't spring it was very likely I'd die before I even started." Senku mused. "That worked, on the 3719th spring. All of humanity had been petrified for that time."

He sighed lightly. "It's a good thing I've played a lot of civilization building games, I guess." That was a joke, despite the fact he was deadpan about it. He also didn't sound like it was a sore topic, he found it incredibly fascinating, in fact.

"Recreating the technology. I have a mastery of knowledge in essentially all of the hard sciences and maths, those were my interests. Things like programming too, but we're nowhere near a computer or the internet. Probably the most technological advancement we have is the manufacturing of steel. It really depends on what your priority is. If it's communications, we have GPS, radar and cellphones, of some sort, based on the radio waves in the village. Keeping time isn't a problem." He tapped his head. "So navigation with a sextant on land was helpful, but I'm planning on using the radio wave GPS for when we take our trip to America."

Nita whistled, though in the back of her head she could feel the peridexis shrug.

"Not being cold when you got out sounds like it'd be pretty important," Nita underscored, picking up on his preference for that season.

"And yeah, I'll bet. Making even punch-card technology will take a while in doing... but travel by boat is a lot easier."

She picked up her plate from where she'd left it. "Better clear this out before I get crumbs on the goods here. Want to chat more later, or come up to the Kitchen with me? There's probably still some good tea left, if you want it."

"Ah, yeah, as what I considered to be the only human on the planet at the time, spring was vital so I didn't die to exposure." Senku said agreeably with a nod. "I wasn't far off about that assessment, the village that was about 80 kilometres away didn't have a big population. It's a long story."

"Sure, I'll take some tea." He preferred tea over coffee anyway, so he gestured and then stepped out of the way before letting her lead.

"So, I broke free of the petrification on April 1st. I have a lot of theories about that too, but nothing definitive yet. My best friend, Taiju, broke himself free on October 5th." Senku mused. "Six months. He was able to do that because he too was aware, just less so. He's not much of a thinker. He was-" A very deep sigh here. "Thinking about Yuzuriha."

"In any event, everyone else from what I gather was just in a state of cold sleep, or something like it."

"I'll bet," Nita said, even with only that much info to go on. Fewer people to search, fewer people to help support... who knew what the ultimate problem was, as long as there were problems?

~~Finally, another tea worshipper. So many people here were addicted to coffee...~~

"So, you got yourself free out of a desire to survive, and Taiju did it for love?"

Neither of those reasons seemed very surprising that they'd get somewhere eventually.

"It was incredibly vital that he broke free because I'm not sure I could've survived winter alone." Senku admitted readily. "It is hard to imagine, but it is incredibly difficult to keep one human alive with nothing but your hands to do it. I was spending all day doing that one, tiny thing."

He shook his head wryly. "Yeah, and I thought he was annoying when he hadn't confessed to her in five years, now it's been so long it's just impossible."

As long as he didn't have to hear about it, that was the main thing.

Nita made a wry face, before apologizing to someone coming down the hall and edging out of their way. "Sorry."

Back to Senku, she said, "Yeah, you'd need a team to handle that scenario better. If only so you have companionship..."

Let alone the less-social practicals.

But she found herself snickering at his next complaint. "Yeah, all that time to himself, he would get used not to sharing it."

Almost made her and Kit seem normal! Granted, neither of them had been frozen in stasis for thousands of years...

He would just step aside, Nita already apologized which was just as efficient as if he'd done so, though really wasn't his style.

"Yeah. That's true." Senku murmured, and that particular thread of thought got rapidly dropped. He wasn't completely immune to things of that nature, and those six months had been excessively challenging.

"No, don't worry, he made up for lost time when he woke up." Senku said blandly. "He's the most ridiculous person I know." They were best friends basically because Taiju decided to be his friend one day.

"Anyway, with him free, I was free to focus on my research of course, which yielded some results finally the next spring, and we have a way to revive the people who are petrified. It's just limited based on resources, but I have a plan for that. While I've secured a perpetual source of nitric acid, we do need to make vast quantities of alcohol. The revival fluid is a concentrated version of nital."

Senku couldn't help himself from explaining, it was a reflex. "Nital Etch, as it was sold for etching projects was usually found with a maximum amount of nitric acid on the market of about 10%, 15% if you found an industrial supplier, but the petrification won't be broken down by that, but by making my own I can play with the ratios, in both the nitric acid and alcohol solutions."

"Could almost call that a matter of balance," Nita remarked. Or taking one to know one, she thought but didn't say.

"... That's to pour on them, not ingest, right? Because when you say alcohol..."

She was pretty sure that wasn't what he meant, but the resulting mental image was quite something.

"Though, how do you mean perpetual source of nitric acid?"

"Being required to hear about his girlfriend for hours on end is not as fun as it sounds." Senku said wryly. "However, the big oaf, dimwitted he may be, is durable. He has so much endurance, it's like someone's cheating. I have none. So he's suited to manual labour and I am not. There's a balance there, after all, everyone has different strengths."

Senku believed that when people worked together, they were stronger, because everyone had a skill that someone else might not have.

"Yeah, you pour the solution over the statues, it's not the alcohol that's the problem. If you ingest nitric acid, that's a quick way to die. The alcohol...well at 96% proof, our brandy will get you drunk, certainly. It's not particularly good though. Passable."

He was all too happy to keep talking science, all day, every day. "I'm glad you asked. When I began, the nitric acid we were using came from a natural source, it was dripping down from a cave inhabited by bats, made essentially from guano of course, which was good in the small scale, but if you really want to manufacture nitric acid, you need platinum. We happened to acquire a piece of platinum on treasure island, so once we put it under pressure and add ammonia, which is incredibly easy to come by, it oxidizes into nitric oxide. This gets done twice and added to water and you're finished!"

None of that exactly sounded like a quick or easy process, actually, but compared to how long it would take to make a new natural source? Much much easier.

"You don't need to tell me that one twice," Nita agreed.

As for the science, she could follow it; guano, while gross, was a fact of life. And as for platinum...

"Bit of a literal 'treasure island', there. What were you using to add the pressure?"

If they had, say, a vacuum chamber, that was one thing, but if they could forge steel it sounded as if they had something that worked just as well.

"My old man had an annoying sense of humour, but it fits well enough." Senku quipped in return, he didn't really care what the island was called, since no one who lived on it knew it's original name anyway.

"We haven't built it yet. We just got the platinum, so we'll build it when we get the chance. We've got a couple of things going in tandem, what with dealing with the probable adversary on the moon, we also have to get into space. It's going to be a matter of dividing and conquering. I have to decide what resource we're going to chase first. I do think it's the alcohol though, there's no way we can produce that on a large scale, but if we can get yellow dent corn from America, that would change the game."

"... Family hideaway?"

It was the simplest explanation.

"Getting from stone-age tech back to the space age... how long do you have?"

If the villain was hiding out on the moon, it sure sounded like they could afford the wait, but still!

"In a manner of speaking." Senku said, and then made movements to help himself to tea. "I did say it was long, it's also somewhat complicated."

He knew that because once he realized and made the connections, he'd had to explain them.

"To put it succinctly...Byakuya wasn't on the surface of the planet at the time of the attack. Now I'm not clear it actually was an attack, but for purposes of simplification and discounting all of my theories, let's go with that. He was an astronaut, so he was up on the ISS with four others and a space tourist, a pop idol." Senku replied. "It was the week of changeover so they were still up there together, so when humanity was petrified, they returned to Earth, set themselves up on that island and proceeded to repopulate the world, essentially. Probably somewhere in the oral records there's an exact number of descendants between the six, but I can't be sure offhand."

Ruri wasn't exactly around to ask, and it didn't matter in the end.

"However, aside from establish the mythos the villagers all follow in the form of a hundred stories, apparently he spent much of his life trying to gather as much gold and platinum as he could, and upon his death it was encased in concrete in the remains of the Soyuz capsule. I knew where it was because of one of those tales. A few of the tales were clues left behind for me."

He took a sip.

"As for how much time we have? As long as it takes. I'm not afraid of a long-term project."

Edited (Hit enter too fast oops.) 2020-08-17 14:40 (UTC)

Nita had her own tea preferences; fortunately there were good flavors in stock, and someone had cleaned the carafe that morning.

"Hell of a story... how healthy are the villagers, being the descendants of so few people?"

The answer was probably 'not very', but one could never assume.

"Well, as long as you're not in a hurry - we don't exactly know if we have a timeline for being on this train, either, even if time isn't passing at all back home."

"Mmm, I imagine that was quite the problem at the time, but it's been over a hundred generations, I expect natural selection has come into play, and some of the less desirable genes have been bred out over time. It would be fascinating to take some blood and do some genetic studies but I don't have that kind of equipment yet." Senku was giving the question serious thought though, it wasn't the first time.

"Overall, they are pretty healthy. There are people in the village who are in their 50s, even 60s, but I expect the average life expectancy is pretty low all the same. They didn't have much by way of medicine, so things like illness run rampant when they appear. It was lucky that Ruri's pneumonia didn't, actually. On average, in a year, they lose people to exposure and starvation. They were primarily a hunting and gathering tribe. I'd expect too, that probably infant mortality rates and childbirth are just as perilous."

"Some of them are nearsighted, that much I've noticed, but how they differ genetically I'm not in a position to say just yet."

Senku quirked a smile at that. "You don't say. Fascinating data point." It was good to know time wouldn't pass. "All the same, if for some reason I didn't return, I expect my generals will handle it, so I'm not worried."

Nita made a private note to check her Manual on that genetic math; one would think they'd become too unhealthy to survive as a whole after all... Lucky for Senku that hadn't been the case, though.

She made a grimace. "Not exactly a pleasant environment for them. Given they had to recreate plumbing as well, I imagine."

It occurred to Nita that, technically speaking, Senku was younger than her. ~~Blame Nautilus.~~ She quickly put that thought aside.

Sure

10billionpercent - 2020-08-17 16:21 (UTC) - Expand

Aaaand wrap.

unfavorableinstigation - 2020-08-17 16:36 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Event: Healing Waters

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Can keep threading or fade at this point; up to you! This discussion is fun. ^^

I can keep going, he's not bored with this conversation...ever.

Just as long as we can submit it in time for AC, I'm good. XD

I promise to be diligent :D

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Fade out as they drink tea?

Sure

Aaaand wrap.