etrayamemes | TDM 001

⏵ arrival⏴
Arrival goes as anticipated. Characters awaken in the pristine, new hospital, greeted by Aurora and potentially getting a rundown of what's happening depending on their approach to being dropped somewhere new. The door to their room opens, and new arrivals are left free to explore their new environment.

Or what exists of it anyway. Exiting the hospital will show that there isn't much of anything just yet. Generally, Echo can build new facilities before new arrivals awaken, but it appears that this time… well, it didn't happen. The apartment complex exists, standing just beside the hospital, and there are a few facilities that are half constructed, companion bots carrying around rebar and other necessary bits and pieces, but they're not quite ready. Oops. But maybe, just maybe, one of those half-built facilities is familiar - a childhood home, a favorite supermarket, the run-down garage they worked at as a youth, a grounded spaceship in the middle of one of the massive bridges connecting land over rivers.

The companion bots will offer quiet apologies if approached; they were expecting new arrivals to touch down, but not quite this early. They'll be ready soon! A few more days at most, they promise. In the meantime, do not stray too far from the hospital. While most of Etraya looks habitable, they have not finished verifying that it's safe for its new inhabitants.

The apartment building and hospital are safe, and the land directly around them is fine, but beyond that? Stay away. But hey, the hospital's cafeteria is fully stocked with cuisine from across the multiverse! Please feel free to settle in, choose an apartment, and get to know your new friends.

⏵ water you doing?⏴
Decide not to listen? Well, the companion bots had offered their warnings.

Etraya is a new establishment, one that received newcomers before it was ready. And as such, the land has not quite been prepared for their arrival. Wandering off the land the apartment building and hospital are settled on comes with very, very poor results. Take a step down into the river below, and you'll find yourself uncomfortably hot. Or cold. Or hot and cold, because whatever that 'water' is, it wasn't meant to be played in. The only way to resolve the temperature regulation issue, as Aurora informs, is finding a buddy to cuddle up with. Those who are lucky may have a nearby friend they're familiar with and don't mind leaning a shoulder against. Those that don't? Well. . . have fun having a very uncomfortable conversation with a stranger, asking them if it's alright if you lean into them or hold their hand for a bit. Any physical contact will do, as long as it's directly skin-to-skin.

Except that's not where the contact stops. Characters will find that, for the next several hours, they'll feel everything that their companion feels. Frustration, anger, amusement, homesickness that comes from being so far away from their families and friends - all those feelings? They're not your feelings, they're our feelings now.

No explanation is given for how the empathy bond and the temperature regulation are related, but it may have to do with how since they had decided not to listen, it was time to test how well they could cohabitate with their new friends.

⏵ bonding bingo ⏴

Maybe it feels a little too much like Obi-Wan had when receiving Leia's message, but all new arrivals are their universe's only hope. Except they're not the only ones arriving, and not the only ones who are trying to keep their worlds safe. Instead, they've arrived with several others who carry the same weight on their shoulders. And they aren't meant to go through this alone. The people they've arrived with are both their new companions and their competition. Both comrades to fight beside and enemies to battle against, depending on what the specific mission of the month is. But currently?

They're here to bond. It's important to get to know those who they'll be spending the next unspecified but lengthy amount of time with, isn't it? To that extent, Aurora's hologram waits just inside the hospital's front doors, offering bonding bingo cards to those willing to participate. It's not necessary, but she does specify that this is one way to get ahead: cooperation is important, especially given what they're going to face together. Bingo cards are three long and three across, and offer a multitude of activities you can do to check each box off.

Some examples include:

Learn someone's biggest secret

Get into a fight

Tell someone something that you've never admitted out loud to

Throw a drink on someone

Win a game of pool in the apartment building's recreation room

Cheat on a card game without getting caught

Hug a new friend

Get stabbed

Steal something important to someone

Pull off an elaborate prank on a stranger

⏵ matchmaker ⏴

When the earpiece is put on, a nice green HUD(head-up display) lights up in front of new arrivals. It asks them for their name, which is fairly standard for these.

Except it seems it wants them to put together a profile to help pair them off with other new arrivals. For some, this information may autofill with what Aurora was able to discern about them from watching them in their home worlds. But some lucky individuals may catch their profiles before they're posted live, and have the opportunity to edit out information included in fields, even if they're not able to clear it out entirely.

Welcome to Aurora's idea of matchmaking. Have fun getting paired off with a buddy or four, with your profiles exchanged between one another. Maybe they're the perfect match. Maybe this is a nightmare in the making.

⏵ OOC ⏴
Welcome to our first TDM! We're excited to have you here. For more information on character arrivals, click here. For any questions relating to the TDM please reply below. All other questions can be directed to the FAQ.

⏵FULL NAVIGATION⏴

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( in short, the whole of this is Not Okay. waking up in a brightly lit room in a stiff hospital bed, hooked up to cables with a distant beeping nearby, followed by the sheer audacity of someone telling her she has to save the world, again. righteous fury kicks into overdrive, stunning her to silence just as good at the dryness in her throat and whatever feel good drug's winding down inside her. none of it puts her at a stalemate with what the reality is: she has to get out of here.

impending doom is nothing new. being told it's up to her when the so-called leaders slip up, also not new.

raven manages because she always manages, has to when the choices presented to her in either hand like a nasty trick are manage or give up. limping to her brace and clothes across the room is likely not going to be the hardest challenge she's faced with today. it's honestly not that surprising that a new gambit to run has been dropped in her lap, after looking at the visage of earth swathed in nuclear fire across each continent.

( of course it's something else. it's always something else. she can't seem to count on anything like she can count on the next horrible extinction event. some offense, clarke and bellamy. not full, still some. )

she fumes and the vapors sustain and motivate her like despair won't. while the other newcomers seem to be filing downstairs to the cafeteria, raven only follows along to a point. she detours a hard right away from the elevator and either breaks a window to get into medical supplies, steals a keycard, or finds some other crafty way to get to them — weirdest option of all being, they aren't even maintained securely at all.

raven should be floored by what she witnesses next: clarke griffin in all her thieving glory, squirreling away enough morphine to start a cult. somehow clarke being here isn't the shock it's supposed to be, instead it feels appropriate. like if they could have picked anyone from earth, they would have picked her first. who wouldn't? )

Hey, pill hoarder. ( hm. is that hoarse mess her voice? no. denied. can't be. come to think of it, her eyes don't even burn, it's just the air quality. ) Save some mind-numbing drugs for the rest of us.

( for whatever it's worth — after two years absolutely failing to prompt any positive, world saving change and slowly devolving to something angrier and harsher than she'd ever been on earth, constantly wishing for the comfort of faces from her homeworld and the skillset that came along with their mechanic, clarke griffin would still pick raven reyes first. for world-saving feats, and anything else that matters.

but she's simply gone so long without the other girl — without any of their friends staying — that, on some level, clarke has emptied herself and tried to pour their likenesses into every one of her actions. tried to emanate octavia blake's skillset with a sword, lexa kom trikru's leadership, bellamy blake's heart and the affection he exudes through violent means for the people he cares about, jasper jordan's we should all die vehemence at the end of the world, her mothers bedside manner. at some point, the better parts of her father had fallen by the wayside, but jake griffin's optimism in people isn't sustainable in any world outside of the ark. or even on board the ship, seeing as he'd been floated for trying to do the right thing.

the current theft of the medicine cabinet here? that's a little john murphy flavored.

clarke's got at least eleven vials of proper, medical grade morphine in her arms. and when a voice calls out from the doorway, she startles but doesn't drop them. those precious vials might be useful if she were to make it any distance into the woods, or if the supply ever stopped like it'd been wont to do on board the serena eterna. no, what has three vials of milky white opiates crashing to the floor upon her abrupt turn to face the intruder on her crimes is — recognition. near instant, despite the fact she's gone so long with nothing but her gradually fuzzing memory for the specifics of raven's face. it's like she's been cupping watery reflections of her friends in her hands, trying desperately but failing to not to let the liquid seep through her fingers, and then suddenly being confronted with the real life manifestation of her dreams. in the span of all of three seconds clarke goes from wondering if she's hallucinating, to a tempered sort of excitement, to wondering if she's hallucinating because this place wants to play with her emotions, to blue-screen-spinning-beach-ball of death-ing... )

...Raven?

( and then to gasping, because at some point along the way she'd forgotten to breathe. the defensive air she'd embodied when initially turning to face the voice has melted off entirely. the morphine vials are suddenly unimportant, and she clumsily deposits the remaining eight on the nearest counter.

and she moves without even thinking, trying to immediately cross the entire room and reach out for the other — to excitedly touch, to grab her arms, to look into her face at close range, to reaffirm that this is real — only to clip her hip rather severely on the corner of a chemist table in the middle of the room. clarke is delighted until she's in pain, but even if it's stopped her in her tracks for a brief second, there's nothing that can kill the watery smile the carves itself into her face. tears of relief, tears of ow that really fucking hurt but i won't be distracted from this moment, and pent up tears of an empty sort of longing finally realized in flesh before her — they're all collecting along her waterline and dangerously close to spilling over.

one hand on her probably bruising hip, she's still flooding towards the door like a tsunami wave that promises a really tight hug when she gets to her destination. she'd leave all the morphine right where it lay if it meant she got to keep —)

Oh my god, Raven, you have no idea how happy I am to see you —

( well, truth be told, the electric shock of nearly violent relief is mutual. the singe in the air is nearly palpable. maybe it's just the burn of chemicals, the crunch of broken glass around clarke's feet, the unwelcome pinprick down her spine at stepping foot in any sort of medical facility again. her imagination that fills in the blanks and makes it real.

( lord knows she's had no shortage of hearing and seeing things in the past. )

the last time raven saw clarke was when she was giving her explicit instructions on how to get the signal going at the radio tower and a very real countdown. she remembers riding a lot closer to near extinction of their people than was smart, and raven was nothing if not calculated. in her equations, in planning, in knowing how to push at unreasonable limits. and she'd waited as long as she could anyway, indulging bellamy's loyalty, burning down the wick to nothing on her reservoir of hope.

( the radiation's already affecting the avionics. it's now or never. )

she hasn't forgotten strong-arming bellamy into the rocket with soft urging, just like she doesn't forget how when she lost her words to explain the impossible choice, bellamy had spoken for her and been the bad guy they already knew to expect from their co-leader. clarke is alive. clarke is alive. this is the first time in months that raven hasn't kept herself so busy tinkering with eight tasks at once ( easy enough with everything beeping with warnings every five seconds ) to stay ahead of the incapacitating survivor's guilt. this is the first time in months that raven can feel something other than self-loathing when her thoughts stray towards her decision: save seven lives, lose one. is this what it felt like for clarke, all those times raven spit venom in her face, knowing she tried her damndest?

she can't speak. she can't move.

clarke slams into the counter with all the grace of a natural disaster and raven blinks back the disassociation, the out-of-body sensation that she's a visitor, a voyeur to this long-awaited yet never fully believed reunion. )

You're alive.

( i didn't kill you. )

Clarke, I thought —

( and she doesn't know, really, whether the sob is so loud that it buckles her knees or if it only feels that way because it's amplified in her head, because she's been biting it back for so long that now she has to choke on all the repressed grief. it's not like she has anything else she's supposed to be doing in the moment. sure, eventually, getting them out of here, but for now? clarke's stupid ass is hugging her and she's not in a place to scoff or shove her away, so she just tries to right herself and hold on. she feels it all in a wave: the resentment, the relief, the anger, the loss, the gratitude — a mixed bag of complications through the messy tears she will definitely deny later.

for however long it takes until she's sniffling quietly. back in reserve, back to some resemblance of control. and then, pulling back, audacity returned: )

What the hell are you wearing?

TDM 001

arrival (b) bc i have no self-control and this won't get out of my head

clutches my chest

no subject