middleofsomewhere | Event: In Pursuit of Knowledge

Entry tags:

Event: In Pursuit of Knowledge

The day after the Voidtrecker speaks to the voidtreckers they arrive at the voidhub.

"Approaching Voidbase now. Prepare for docking."

There is no shaking, not leaving the void: instead those who risk looking out of the windows will see a large structure ahead of them. The void turns to metal around them as they enter the structure, and for a moment, there is nothing outside the train but darkness.

"Welcome Voidtreckers." A voice speaks over the ICPs. Not the voice of the train, this is a male voice, sentient. "The filtration process takes a few moments, so please be patient. Meanwhile, I am sending some information about our void base over to your SCA's."

They will receive a small pamphlet on their SCA's explaining about the void base, that it was set up as a research base and has been expanded to provide living quarters for some of those rescued from system #78961112094711. It explains that they had made the decision to invite the voidtreckers there to further unravel the mystery surrounding them. They would be quartered in ministry sleeping areas, and have free access to the ministry part of the base. Anyone who wished to visit the citizens of system #78961112094711 could do with good reason.

It's not too long before the filtration process is completed, and the doors of the Voidtrecker Express open. They are greeted by a group of ministry workers. Among which are Lia Nine, Ten Nank, and Anan- who isn't strictly a void ministry worker, but is there to greet them nonetheless.

IN PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

22-29 RABBIT ~ VOIDBASE INFO ~ OOC INFO ~ NETWORK
SCA EXPERIMENTS ~ COMBAT TRAINING ~ REACHING OUT ~ ARCHIVE RESEARCH

SETTLING IN

They are shown to their sleeping quarters first. They are in small suites, which match their room assignments on the train. They will be given time to unpack and rest, and told that their SCA's have been programmed to allow them access to the general ministry parts of the base.

Their time here is their own, And though the ministry hopes that they will help out with the various experiments and research programs they have going on, they do not need to. If they wish to take the time to rest and enjoy the amenities, they can.

1. MULTIMEDIA. There are a few types of lounging rooms, chairs and cushions, tables for sitting at. Slim televisions sitting on walls, a few tables - that can be lowered or raised - joined with screens that can be more privately watched. Shows and movies are available in some rooms, gaming equipment in others. There is also a more quiet room for lounging in, with access to e-books and screen readers for them, audio options also available.

Relax, or get into a multiplayer game -- games that break friendships are available in the void.

2. FITNESS AND SWIM. For those looking for more activity in their 'rest', there's the fitness gym and swimming pool. In separate rooms but nearby, the fitness gym is larger than the train's gym, and more well-equipped. Muscle training, speed; there will be a Ministry worker to show how to use the variety of equipment, so that nobody has an accident.

The same will be for the swimming pool, with a shallow and deep end. Balls, floating pads and more can be grabbed. It's a swimming pool - what's not to love?

3. TRAINING. Beside the pool and fitness gym is the combat gym, where they will find small groups already exercising in a variety of fighting styles. Voidtreckers will be left alone to train if they wish, but any who take interest in partners will be allowed to join in with the ministry training. Magic, energy, weaponry; some of them use special batons, Ministry-issued, and the Ministry workers will show how to use them. If a Voidtrecker becomes well-trained in how to use one by the end of their stay, they can be given one to use on void missions.

The Ministry fighters will also introduce them to a special training tool, the hard- and holographic courses and 'dummies'. Quite a few fighting styles can be set to a holographic opponent, or even one made to mimic a voidtrecker after fighting them - they're surprisingly quick to adapt. The hard-light partner can listen and read sign-language, and will change on command. Want them to move faster, focus on attack, dodging? Now they will.

4. GREEN THUMBS, OPEN AIR. The last room in the relaxation area is a curious one, reading simply 'GARDENS AND SIMULATION' on its front. Opening it will lead to a simple and long corridor, five more doors on each side. Four devoted to gardening, labelled Hydroponics, Hot Houses, Ice Houses, and Land. Entering, each space will be larger than should be possible. But it is, with each an indoor type growing space except for land, which mimics a farming field. There's a sky above, a wind in the air; sometimes, it might be raining when you enter.

It might be a shocking experience for some, the first time round.

The last six rooms simulation rooms are less specific, but with plenty more options. Rooms of prayers, beaches, cities, open valleys; with some time spent learning the menu, people can recreate a realistic area. The rooms can be set to private, but some people may leave the spaces they've created - on purpose, at random, or on accident - free for others to wander into. Sharing is caring, and there's only six of these rooms, you know.

TESTING AND EXPERIMENTING

Anyone who wishes to take part in the experiments will be given their options, and led to the appropriate rooms. Health checks, tether scans, combat training; each one is voluntarily, and Voidtreckers will be be granted their results.

There is much to discover, as well to ensure the health and safety of the Voidtreckers. And what can they learn about the Voidtrecker Express, the lost tethers, and the anomaly known as the World Eaters? Time may finally tell...

1. SCA EXPERIMENTS. For those who wish to help out with the SCA and health experiments- be that through taking part in experiments or helping conduct them- they will be shown to the labs. There are a few different labs, doing different things.

The scientists are generally friendly, if very no nonsense. They will answer questions and explain their research, and are open to listening to new ideas and theories. All ideas are on the table. This situation is unprecedented, there are no easy answers.

They will put any voidtreckers to work who wish to help- be it washing beakers or recording data. They will teach as they go- as long as someone is willing to listen and learn, it won't matter if they have no experience in science.

2. REACHING OUT TO THE VOID. At the top of the void base is an area with a clear domed roof, allowing in the light of the void. Here voidtreckers can attempt to reach out, to strengthen their connection with the train and through it try and find those that have left the train.

It's a slow learning curve. Their first few hours of attempts will be meditation that goes no where. but eventually most should be able to tap into their connection with the train and the other passengers.

Reaching out further is harder, often feeling as if they are falling through the void. It's exhausting, not quite so much as anchoring, but similar. It's easy to get lost in the void, though the room has ministry workers who are highly trained and will be able to help anyone who needs it.

They do say it might be easier to go in pairs, to meditate together and help guide each other, using each others tethers as a touch point. Anything is worth a try.

3. ARCHIVES. For those who prefer old-fashioned research, there is plenty to sink their teeth into here. Books, articles, message boards. Everything needs cross-referenced and checked and verified. What is a rumour? What is true?

It's a buzz of activity at all hours, though there are quieter areas for those who need silence to concentrate. For those less skilled at research, there are always notes to copy up neat.

OOC NOTES

~ Questions.
~ This event runs until the 26th June (Day 29)
~ There will be a concluding post on the 25th to wrap up the memory restoration.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He nods, considering as he listens to Tidus. He gets it, or thinks he gets it, having his own analogues that feel close enough to grasp onto the idea of what Tidus is saying to him. To try and envision how it works for Tidus, or how Tidus is approaching the problem.

"Would you mind if I play for a while? Unless... you need it to be quiet here." A different sort of meditation for Jingyi, one with music, part of how he can navigate what comes down to spirits reaching out to other spirits. Lines and connections.

There's a blink, a curiosity, but after a second dispelled as he smiles, a joking curl just as he asks:

"Not gonna put me to sleep with it, are you?"

Is this the deadly lullaby that sends people (and trains) into deep slumbers, Jingyi?

"Only if you ask nicely," he says, off the cuff in joking back. His grin is short lived, but genuine.

So is the settling in the ground, cross legged, summoning his qin in a blue tinged light. He rests it across his lap, checking the strings, strumming a few notes as he goes.

"So, I've been reading in the Archives, getting distracted by this group of people super into becoming one with the void. Most of it was headed inducing stupid, but the thing with communicating with those in the void sounds a bit like what we're trying to do. They called it becoming one with the song of the void, and listed this and that for reaching out once you had." A glance back to Tidus, brows raised. "Wanna try singing with the Void?"

...Talk about popping out of nowhere two surprises: one the qin (well, that one Tidus expected, with the talk of music), and a duet.

His brow comes in, perplex, deciphers that as: "What, do we wanna go, ahhhhh, ahhhhhhhhhhh?"

It's not too loud, but it is an attempt at half-heartedly mimicking the wailing cries that the void chorus makes, as showcased by vocal master Tidus. It'd be a joke, if Tidus wasn't wondering how exactly this was meant to work out.

Wait, Jingyi didn't want him to make wailing void noises for real, did he?

He grins, lifting his shoulders in a small shrug.

"You can hum along if you want." No, he didn't need a wailing chorus, because verisimilitude only does so much, and neither of them need to torture each other in that particular way. Probably. Unless Tidus really feels that energy, in which case, he'll roll with it.

For his part, he starts to craft his own version of the chorus, reduced to a stringed instrument and his sense of what he's heard, time and again. Once his fingers have the feel of it, the motions registering in his muscles like a blooming memory, he closes his eyes.

It's too soothing, in its way: the qin is not an instrument played often to jar, though it can. He has to correct himself time to time, until the qin cries as if it had a voice not comprised of strings plucked and pressed to craft their song.

...how does the singing sound? It isn't that Tidus hasn't heard it; he's heard it so many times, through choice and otherwise, but trying to grasp anything significantly memorable is like holding onto water right now.

Even with Jingyi's playing, pretty as it is with so little. Tidus attempts to follow it, but his humming is disjointed, unsure.

Before long, he falls back onto another tune it's always reminded him of. A quiet thing under his breath, not flowing about them as the strings of the qin, but something that Tidus can manage himself. Does it connect him to anyone of the void? Only one person, out there -

Someone far more musically inclined than he is.

He doesn't so much intend to incorporate some of Tidus's tune into his own playing, but it's the flow of it, the harmonics of what the void sang like to his ears, and Tidus's melody, and a practise song from his own youth.

(For he is so very old nowadays, isn't he?)

He can keep it up for hours, for all that the one that ties him most to is his departed clan leader. Wen Sizhui was not a qin player, did not have the same traditions he grew up within.

Jingyi's focus tunneled inward, seeing himself as he always did, the flow of energy through his meridians, and the music played on. Cycling and cycling, and who was to say how long it was until he could finally detect... something. Linkage, a line away from his core, back to a point that he saw no end to. Not the same energy he had within himself, not his spiritual energy as he understands it, but something similar. Thin and bright.

The start of the inkling back to point one: back to the Voidtrecker Express? He wonders, pushing his own awareness along that line, seeing if he's not instead finding some stupid aftereffect of whatever the frick had happened in the memory caves.

There is something to this music; how Jingyi manages to connect them, and Tidus isn't discouraged from keeping it up on his side, lips kept pursed. It's something familiar, bittersweet yet homely for him. And Tidus doesn't think he notices only his own link to the train, but that of the body beside him - Jingyi, another link to these happenings as much of him, another on this ride.

Either it's that, or he's imagining things. But he finds himself syncing to this melody better, what it's become, without any conscious effort put into it. This space, where he perceives life in ocean-like waves than anything visually concrete, stables. But there's the tethers amongst those waves, long lines of ropes that he needs to focus on, try not to be distracted; find the one that will lead him to the train, or notice the one that somehow brighter in this lightless place behind his eyes.

With its melody, that manages to rise in volume in Tidus's mind without bringing discomfort, when he reaches out with a question, voiceless.

Jingyi?

The music hitches a note of surprise, Jingyi's fingers reacting to his feeling even as the presence he correlates to feeling like Tidus, a signature that's both uniquely his friend's and also uniquely not in a way difficult to quantify. The melody doesn't pause, settles back down like the hair on a startled cat's back as they calm, or the ruff of a dog after the posturing is over.

No bark, but a similar sensation of presence and words directed without a voice, soundless. Jingyi, only characterised by whatever he is here, his own interpretation of what he feels gone to threads weaving through a glistening, glittering, faintly rainbow streaked night sky.

Tidus? A pause, the memory of having Elidibus talking in his head, taken and dismissed, focussing himself forward once more. Entangled in a gentle way with Tidus in this space that wasn't a space, exactly. What pissed you off after the time we were on that planet with the pools you liked?

Are you real, or are you an invention of this mental exercise, this reaching out along lines of energy to find whoever else should have been here but wasn't in the right way.

He feels the surprise better than hears it, the distortion to the music more visible - in a sense - than how it catches in his ears. It does waver his concentration, though Jingyi does pick back up easily, and it's a momentary flutter that he recovers from in the same.

There's emotions there, feeling, but it's not quite clear for Tidus to pick up. He's only so much used to this, mostly in anchoring, where the overlap was stronger, hard to know where one person started and the other ended; but this is less intertwined, though the question - test - that Jingyi provides does offer dull glimpses as Tidus thinks.

Pools I liked? Thinking, visuals that don't quite form, until he thinks to himself, Aquafir?, and then - trying to remembering what pissed him off. At Aquafir? After Aquafir? And he's recalling the large outdoor pool, leaving an envelope with a worker at the front desk; some vague grumbling about the train, but also, what happened directly after Aquafir....?

...this is definitely making his concentration on the tethering dip, as the crease above his brow thickens. Tidus isn't very good at remembering things that pissed him off months ago.

Jingyi's spirit laughs, a choked sound making it out of his very physical throat. Tidus not recalling is exactly as reassuring as it ends up being, Jingyi more inclined to be on edge about spiritual and mental connections. That it near breaks Tidus's concentration leads Jingyi to relaxing, humming the melody along with his playing steadily.

Doesn't matter. Wanted to be sure it was you, you.

Flowing melody, flowing spiritual ties, not quite as chaotic as butterflies flitting around a garden. The sense of a line, made of himself and something other, and he reaches out to brush against the sense of Tidus once more, gaining a better sense of him and his other, how two others make a whole that is Tidus.

This counts as weird. I'm not wrong about that. Right?

His mind does start to wonder over to the after of Aquafir, but the reassurance - and his own figuring that he's getting too distracted - pulls him back. A nagging still, like a buzzing in the back of his mind (Oh wait, there was that thing in the gym...), but he feels himself tipping out of this link, whatever it is, and tries to refocus. Jingyi's presence actually a stable thing, an unintentional means of getting onto his feet again. Drifting there, at least not like a rushing stream.

Just like a...thing. Ugh. Speaking of weird.

Uh huh. It's like a pulse of recognition, his response. I heard people saw somethin' trying to work out the tethers on the train... was this it?

Was this possible, on the train as well? It's strange, as Jingyi said, to even imagine; but even as Tidus wonders, so does he wander - wondering if from here, could they reach out to others in the room? Strings of himself idly reaching out without direction, not serious in the quest, but hoping to 'see' easy others about as he feels Jingyi now.

But Jingyi is a more familiar presence to him, and closer.

Can we find more people like this...?

Together, is the implication behind the thought. Two tethers working in sync, searching out others with better results than alone.

Let's try.

That they didn't know offhand was self-evident. All they could do at that point was try, and so he sunk himself into the sensation, a familiarity for spiritual sensations that left his real body that wasn't real at all with a hair-raising chill creeping up the back of his neck.

He settles his mind into it, leaning into the sense of Tidus, thinking in a way of when he'd shared his own energy. This isn't the same thing, or he doesn't think it is, but that sense of opening himself to connection, to extending part of himself out to Tidus... he wonders if that'll help.

Try accepting whatever I'm giving? If it's anything like that one time, maybe it'll boost you looking.

Tidus, who in Jingyi's perception, has a stronger, deeper, heart-linked person to be searching for.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Event: In Pursuit of Knowledge

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

this is the point where i'm like how does thread about the theory of a multihour process

let's have them bump connection lines. bump bump, hi tether!jingyi

!!!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject