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

[10billionpercent]

A lot so far, actually. Unusual rocks. Strange lava that isn't even warm. Seashells that may or may not be made of calcium carbonate. This is exactly the kind of thing I find fun.

[ Every world has mysteries and he's a glutton for knowledge. ]

[xue_yang]

That kind of thing is certainly more interesting then whatever it they are doing on the beach.

[He's smart and has been known to experiment and create new inventions. So discovering what makes this new world function is certainly more exciting then playing games in the sand.]

[10billionpercent]

I know people like that sort of thing, but I'm more interested in the world around me. Always have been.

[ Senku looks up at the sky, thinking about it. ]

I wanted to be an astronaut so, all of that study was going to pay off.

[xue_yang]

An astronaut? What is that?

[He hasn't heard that term before but the way he looks up at the sky he figures it must have something to do with that.]

[10billionpercent]

An astronaut is someone who goes into space and explores, more or less. A lot of them were just doing research on the International Space Station at the time the programs...ended.

[ He shrugs slightly. ]

I was trying to get there under my own power, but I would've probably joined the official agency as a fall back. Now those things don't exist, but I still have every intention on getting to the moon.

[xue_yang]

In a way you just became an astronaut while on the train.

[The train travels to different worlds and places so clearly he has made it to the goal he wanted. He didn't even know that someone could travel to space.]

[10billionpercent]

Ah! Not quite the same at all! I have a theory about the void travel.

[ Hopefully he wants to hear the theory, because he's getting it anyway. ]

I have a few competing hypothesis, but if you look through the physics masters' works you'd see that they had calculations and suppositions around voids and interdimensional travel where you were taken to different points in time, or diverging realities, things of that nature, and it's always physics based. One thought I had was that perhaps it's the void moving and not the train itself but how would you be able to tell the difference? With the naked eye you certainly can't, but perhaps with some data and some scientific principles a more structured guess could be reached at least, and then it's a mater of testing and reproducing the results.

[ He takes a breath. ]

Space, and intergalactic travel are completely different.

[ Really, if Xue does not want to hear this, it's a prime opportunity to tell him to be quiet. Or ask questions, he'll take either one.]

[xue_yang]

[Xue Yang didn't really understand any of that but he listens, curious about it as he speaks.]

And how would you test it? You can't really create another train or void, can you?

[10billionpercent]

Well, no, probably not, although you can test out certain theories and hypothesis, looking for patterns to the places we come for example. A lot of theoretical physics is just that, because we haven't found ways to prove them yet but that doesn't mean there isn't things to learn.

[xue_yang]

[Xue Yang understands testing and trying to figure out exactly how things function. He did enough of that when he was trying to recreate the Stygian Amulet. He hasn't felt inclined to figure out how the train functions but perhaps it would make things interesting.]

If you need help testing it somehow, I might feel inclined to assist.

[10billionpercent]

I'll be sure to keep that in mind. I want to keep exploring what I can with the void. I'm tempted to look at the train too, but not while we're on it, obviously.

[ That sounds like a project for another day. He'd be fascinated in seeing what the train was made of for interstellar travel. ]

Space travel- [ to get back on topic ] involves remaining in the same world, but leaving the surface of the planet and heading up into the sky. Those stars you see, the moon, they're all out in space. The moon in particular, humans have landed on it before in 1969.

[xue_yang]

1969..? I believe would be in the future I am not likely to see.

[Since that is several hundred years after when he dies, given that once he returns home from the train he will be returning to death.]

I'm not sure anyone during my time even considered flying up to the stars.

[10billionpercent]

Well to be fair, I wasn't alive then either, I wasn't born until 2003.

[ He implies he's from the distant past though and that's pretty interesting. ]

What time are you from?

[xue_yang]

It would be about the year 450 AD where I am from. I don't know how much time has passed there since being here but the Xuanzheng dynasty is currently underway.

[He never really paid much attention to who was in charge or when since politics didn't really concern him.]

[10billionpercent]

Interesting. In my world, for me, it's 5741 AD.

[ That probably sounds kind of crazy on its own, but that feeling is mutual. ]

I'd guess that probably around that time you weren't looking at space travel, you're right.

[xue_yang]

We didn't even have a train.

[That is the first piece of modern technology he had to learn about once ending up on the platform. There is a long list of things he has learned about since then. And each time they end up at another stop, even more stuff he has never seen before.]

It seems we have quite a lot of time between us.

[10billionpercent]

You wouldn't, trains didn't appear until 1804.

[ He commented that without even thinking about it, like a reflex for incessant trivia answers. ]

It must be strange for you, then. [ He nods. ] It's a lot of time, yes, but because in my world, my world kind of ended, I started a few years ago with a lot less tech than you have in your time. We're talking stone tools and fire. I just, fortunately, know enough to get from that point to hopefully, back into space.

[xue_yang]

The world ends? [Another curious tilt of the head and a slightly raised eyebrow. That is interesting to know.]

How did it end?

[10billionpercent]

Not in the flashy way everyone was expecting it to, with the explosion of the sun. That's not due for a few billion years yet. Actually, I guess it is more accurate to say civilization ended.

[ He sighs softly. ]

In 2019, something unknown caused every human on the planet to be petrified, turning them to stone and putting them in something like a cold sleep. I've been working on solving the problem, to discover how it came about. After that, nature just took over, so everything humanity built up to that point is pretty much gone.

[xue_yang]

Well at least I don't live to see the end of the world. Though I could probably handle being in a world that is not yet developed.

[Xue Yang has always known how to survive even despite the roughest of circumstances.]

Are you going to try and continue to find out what happened to your world while you are on the train?

[10billionpercent]

Everyone's going to come out of this, I'm going to make sure of it.

[ He's ambitious if nothing else. Part of it is the challenge, part of it is the sheer admiration for what humans can create. ]

It's not so undeveloped anymore, we've been working pretty hard. We even have one paved road. That came about once we got access to the Sagara Oil Field.

[ He nods. ]

Well I'm not sure what I'm going to find out, so much as I have a lot of time to work and fine tune my theories.

[xue_yang]

How long has it been since you woke up on the new world? How many of you were woken up?

[He's rather interested in the idea of a world reborn. He wonders how it would be with the people he knows and which ones would be able to handle starting over in such a way.]

[10billionpercent]

I've been awake the whole time. [ He says this like that's not a big deal ] But I broke free of the petrification three years and 184 days ago, in my world, before I was taken here, based on the date at the time.

I emerged from what I'll call stasis on April 1st, 5738. The next person to break free was my friend and he did so on October 5th. After that, we spent several months experimenting until I had a breakthrough in what we call revival fluid. I had to take into account energy that the other people weren't generating because their minds were asleep when mine wasn't.

At this point in time, we have about a hundred and fifty people, of which about a hundred are people who were revived. There are a great many limitations to how much we can revive people, considering not only the lack of materials, but the fact if we revived a bunch of people without some kind of infrastructure in place, we'd never be able to feed them all.

[xue_yang]

So basically you are the one that is saving the world. That's a fairly heavy burden isn't it?

[He doesn't seem as shocked by the fact that Senku was awake through his entire time being petrified. Somehow It just seems like it is expected and natural given what he has seen in this short time with the other man.]

[10billionpercent]

Yeah, I am, because I can't let humanity die out. I'm not okay with that.

[ The burden though, it is heavy for him to carry but... ]

I'm not alone. I have allies who will work with me to achieve the goal. It's been a long road so far, and a complicated one but right now everyone is working together.