EVENT: Upgrades x2!

[trainmasters]

Who: everyone
When: Day 39, morning
Where: the train!

[Morning dawns on the Aurora with a bang -- literally. A huge crack in the air, like nearby lightning, rattling the train. Look outside in the direction of the still-corrupted island, and you'll see a towering ray of black, malevolent light shooting out into the stars. It continues for a few seconds, flickers, and dies out, leaving no trace of its brief presence.

In its wake is a silence that makes your ears ring, interrupted shortly by the sound of an alert on your Chain. There's an administrator message for you:

★: Hi everyone and good morning!

★: Thanks to all your hard work, we've been able to add two new communal cars to the train. Enjoy your new gym and library! We weren't sure what books you'd like, so we grabbed whatever came to mind. Hope they suit you!

★: Oh, and we noticed a spike of malicious energy just now. No idea what it was, but I'd keep your eyes peeled extra until we've figured it out. It might have something to do with how close we've gotten to purifying this Star.

★: Anyway, thanks as always. And remember, keep positive!

True to the prince's word, you'll find your two new cars attached to the back of the train. Pass through the garden car to find the new gym. It consists of several rooms: a weight room, a room of various machines, a studio for yoga or dance, and a training hall fully equipped with practice weapons according to the tastes of everyone already on the train. Each room is entered from a small lobby containing a few couches and a vending machine that pops out custom smoothies and cold water bottles -- which somehow only works after you've had a workout.

Behind the gym is the library. Near the entrance from the hall you'll find a terminal with a list of all available books. Searching a title will give you the location of the book on the shelves. If a title isn't currently in the library, you may request a copy be added, and it will show up within a few minutes. The library currently has two floors of shelves, containing books that characters who are or have been on the train would find familiar. If the book is common in your character's world or they have a close knowledge of it, they can probably find it here. There are, however, a disproportionate number of romances...

There's also a central reading area, with tables and comfortable chairs for studying or lounging. And a good thing, because if you attempt to remove a book from the library it'll disappear right from your hands to return to the shelves. No late returns for you, Crow lazybones!

For now there's no further activity on the corrupted island, so you may as well enjoy the fruits of your labour!]

Comments

[schrodingerscockroach]

After a certain point, yeah. There was a pretty serious pollution problem and environmental issues and after a certain point it was do it or risk people dying by the millions.

[bowtiedbones]

And you started this in the 21st century? What happened?

[schrodingerscockroach]

Capitalism.

[bowtiedbones]

Note to self, shop at the thrift shops more??

[schrodingerscockroach]

And support environmental laws.

I mean, capitalism is still shit, but at least the laws no longer allow corporations to make planets hot boxes.

[bowtiedbones]

That sounds like maybe your past Earth is worse off than my Earth...? I'm pretty sure that's already a thing nobody is allowed to do?

[schrodingerscockroach]

There's a reason we learned how to do terraforming.

[bowtiedbones]

Are your new planets doing better?

[schrodingerscockroach]

Probably.

We were threatened by extinction for a while, I would hope they are.

I've been in the mountains, a jungle, in a few deserts, and one really nice valley so like. Biodiversity.

[bowtiedbones]

Okay, that's good. I'm glad they're able to be keeping the deserts.

[schrodingerscockroach]

Well, the deserts were at least some years apart. Also both times had aliens.

Might be those artifacts are just always in deserts.

[bowtiedbones]

Were they different kinds of alien?

[schrodingerscockroach]

The Covenant had several different aliens part of it. There were just the Elites with the later memory. Might have been a rank thing.

[bowtiedbones]

How many exactly is several?

[schrodingerscockroach]

[Closing his eyes, hand moving to his cheek, tapping idly as he thinks.]

[Takes a minute.]

....five? That I saw.

[bowtiedbones]

What were they like? Like biologically.

[schrodingerscockroach]

....how detailed do you want me to be because I....was fighting them. To the death.

[Listen]

[There was gore]

[He saw a lot]

[bowtiedbones]

If that gave you extra insights on their internal make-up, great!

[she paid sparks for a necropsy table and put it in her room

she'll be fine]

[schrodingerscockroach]

....fair enough.

[Paaaause.] You may need to like....poke me. I can kind of check out a bit when I'm remembering things, but talking might help with that.

[bowtiedbones]

Would it help to ask specific questions about their anatomy?

[schrodingerscockroach]

It might.

Like my memory is pretty good on the first incident, but details get lost in the shuffle. The second incident had Elite dead bodies, but also the weird....head...thing. AI side effects, probably. A lot more clear on the details.

[bowtiedbones]

[what weird head thing she doesn't know, but also doesn't ask. BODIES FIRST.]

How many eyes did they have? Are they carbon-based lifeforms? If you had to compare them to an Earth animal group, how would you sort them? How many limbs, how many digits per limb? What color was their blood? Did they have blood? Did they smell like anything? What vocalizations do they make, if any?

Fun fact, Halo actually specificies what their blood smells like and that's horrifying.

[schrodingerscockroach]

How do you tell if something is carbon based? Like are all things that aren't like....energy or slime carbon?

Starting with Elites, they're kind of like bipedal gators in body, except they don't have the long snouts or tails. And their mouths open like a fangy flower with four moving flaps and the top of their jaw. Two legs, two arms, four fingers and.... [Growing a little more distant, voice flatting out.] Cloven hooved like feet. Satyrs legs, hunched figure. They were very guttural, a kind of subtle reverb. Blood was a indigoish purple blood. Two hearts.

Skin is similar to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, though sometimes more scaly, from black to brown to grey. They all seemed to have dark blue eyes, two, slitted pupil. [Though that's some of their tech.]

Their blood smells like fresh tar.

[bowtiedbones]

Oh I doubt you'd be able to tell if it was carbon or not by looking at it, and really if it's a creature from a planet that can be made hospitable to humans and other Earth organisms, it should be carbon. There's just this weird thing you see in fiction sometimes where it's like, silicon-based? Which honestly isn't that practical a theory at all, you can't just interchange elements because they're near each other on the periodic table, even if it makes a cool alien for a TV episode.

[writing down the description he gave. she doesn't need to make notes right away, honestly she'll already have this much memorized, but it's a deliberate delay. giving his attention a second to check back in from that flatness.]

[schrodingerscockroach]

I can't be sure if they could breathe the atmosphere or if it was the armor. They were going to kill the planet for all life.

They were taller than the humans, at least seven feet tall, only getting roughly two feet taller and have two thumbs.

There were grunts, most common, not the best fighters. Bipedal, but uses oversized arms to move faster like a primate. Exoskeleton, arms and feet kind of like a spiky crab, kind of shark looking head, small mouth, canines, about five feet tall. Four fingers, maybe toes? Thick blood, light blue, glowed in the dark, creepy to see at night.

[There is no check back in, he's just continuing on to other species while being flat.]