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TDM 004: WASHED ASHORE
| TDM 004: WASHED ASHORE |
Arrival  This time, you come out of the water. While the Augur reboots, the Nameless Island's own inherent energy draws people in. It's like being suspended between realities and walking through a rift in dimensions. It may make you sick, or that might be the motion of the ocean, lifting you and carrying you to shore. Waterlogged and covered in sand, new arrivals will be greeted by robots who welcome them with towels and bracelet devices. The A5 card is already loaded up. Inventory will be found a day later, wrapped up haphazardly and delivered to each person's makeshift home. I. Feel the friendship!  Recent arrivals and visitors to the beach may notice a sudden influx of hundreds of bright red crustaceans crawling (and coupling) across the sand. It's crab mating season, as it turns out, it's a regular invasion! To keep the beach a pleasant place to gather for the island's inhabitants, the robots are offering credits to especially enterprising crab-catchers. Grab a bucket and get to work! Be sure to watch out for their pinch, mind you. Their little claws are tiny, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt. Surprisingly, there is another effect that even the robots don't anticipate: islanders who are pinched by the crabs find themselves feeling instantly buddy-buddy with the next person they spot. Did you just become best friends?! Get pinched one too many times, however, and those feelings may sour into a crabby mood, indeed. If you are feeling particularly vengeful (or just hungry), the little crabs do make for delicious gumbo. Once cooked, they have no side effects whatsoever. II. Phallus Phestival  Although the Augur is offline and supplies are scarce, the robots of Erku are still eager to make their run-down little island a welcoming place for the new arrivals. To that end, they have arranged a three day festival to boost morale and promote the generation of plenty of Eros energy to assist in the restoration of the damaged and decayed parts of the city. The robots claim that this celebration was once a cornerstone of the long-lost civilization of the island. By the dawn of the first day, every island resident will find at their doorstep (or tent flap, mobile suit, etc) the traditional costume of the ancient islanders to wear to the festival. It appears to be... a giant sheet? There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the sometimes garish colors and patterns of the fabric, but at least the robots have uploaded instructions on how to wear it to your bracelet device. Attendees will find food (mostly crab-flavored), confections, and household necessities in rather suggestive shapes, as well as goods you might find handy to complete your A5 squares: sex toys, pervertibles, sexy maid outfits, and the like. While islanders are welcome to set up shop on the festival grounds and sell (or charge) whatever they like, all items from the robots are offered up for free to those who wear their traditional island garb! III. Fireside Adventures  Each night of the festival is wrapped up in style with an enormous bonfire on the beach, where drinks, fruity cocktails, and lively music appropriate for dancing is all provided at no cost by the robots. Even if you’re not usually much of a dancer, the longer you stand by the fire and allow it to warm your limbs, the more you feel like moving! Not only that, but everyone is looking quite beautiful by the firelight, are they not? If you’ve grown tired - or if dancing just isn’t your thing - you might prefer to sit back and swap stories on one of the many driftwood log benches the robots have prepared for seating. Or, maybe you’d prefer to rough it for the night in one of the beachside canvas tents. Better claim one quick, though, or be prepared to share… there’s only one sleeping bag! N A V I G A T I O N |
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[ HA HA.... HA.... ANYWAYS, MOVING ON. ]
As for shelter, I'm pretty sturdy! If I can find a place where I'm relatively safe from sand or sea salt, I should be fine!
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[At least, not from her. Summer's actually very relieved... though the comment about lacking self-defense is pretty worrying. There are threats around the city on occasion, after all.]
Sand and sea salt? So... basically you arrived in the worst possible environment you could have?
[That's almost comical.]
Let's get you off the beach then.
no subject
It's fine, it's fine! I'll go further inland when it's time for me to test, but for the moment, I can stay here and...
... Well. Try to ignore the festival, I guess.
[ She'd been escaping it when she collided with Summer in the first place. ]
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That hardly seems wise. Especially if you have no pressing reason to be on the beach in the first place.
[Since after all, if she's avoiding the festival anyway, wouldn't anywhere else be a better place to be?]
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I've... never seen a beach before. I lived in the Bunker, in space, my entire existence. I've only witnessed the terrestrial world through pictures, videos... replications and approximations.
Everything here is so breathtakingly real... I don't want to just walk away from it without experiencing it for as long as I can.
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Even if it might not be exceptionally healthy.]
Well, I can hardly argue with that. Wait, you said in space? Your world has ways to travel off your planet too?
[One day Summer will stop being amazed by this. Today is not that day.]
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Oh yeah! If not for space travel, the human race wouldn't have even survived. They currently live in a special base on the moon, while the planet below is still a warzone.
[ wait what ]
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[Indeed, for someone like her, who knows more about the situation than most, it sometimes feels like the whole world is about ready to collapse at the slightest push.
The difference being, they can't escape the planet if it comes to that.]
So that's why you and yours were created, then? To fight the war your humans lost?
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[ 6O hummed. It was strange to explain the war to someone else... so many of these facts were just truths of life that she'd taken for granted. ]
The alien forces use Machine Lifeforms as their own proxy soldiers, and created Cores for them that allow them to learn and assemble other Machine Lifeforms, essentially reproducing. All of our intel point at the alien forces just wanting to suck the planet dry of resources to keep building bigger and better armies of Machine Lifeforms. And when they're done here they'll just move on to the next planet.
[ And that was at least... partially still true. Not that she had any concept fo that. ]
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[Seriously, the way she talks it seems like the opposing machines only make more of themselves again and again, so logically that would just mean the entire planet would be turned into an army of war machines. What benefit could that possibly serve?
Except...]
You said aliens... you were battling a starfaring enemy?
[And if they were that advanced, was this just a proxy war for them, then? Were they attempting to use the resources of 6O's planet to create an army to fight a war among the stars?
A horrifying concept, but it made a certain awful amounts of sense.]
no subject
They came some time ago, attacked humanity when it was at a very weak point. Mankind had to flee to the moon, and we androids fight as their proxy, just as the Machine Lifeforms fight on behalf of their alien creators.
no subject
[And just a little familiar.]
Well, one good thing I can say about this place is that conflict like that is at a minimum.