voidtreckernet | Grasshopper 30, Video to Everywhere from Standard, 'Afternoon'

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Grasshopper 30, Video to Everywhere from Standard, 'Afternoon'

[Sometime after lunch, the day before the next platform stop, Nita makes her next appearance on the Network.

~~Hey, this could become a regular thing...!~~]

Nita Callahan with Orange Team, here, and I just want to say: if you didn't have to deal with sharing memories while we were on Jema'grethy, you got off easy.

[Have a wry momentary glance, train.]

That said, if you weren't dealing with that, and didn't climb the mountain, there's some important things you'll want to be clued in on. And by 'important' I mean 'important to how and why the Voidtrecker Express got all kinds of screwed up.'

[So... that's a thing.]

I've got transcripts of the memories Enna, Minako, and I received, if you'd rather not experience the memories themselves. Either come see me or Eva if you want those transcripts, or just me if you want a direct memory transfer.

Those who've already seen the memories - what do you think of them, so far? It may sound kind of 'after the fact,' but how are you doing? There were some real heavy matters brought up in them, and if they're at all relevant to what we're going to be dealing with, we'll need to pull ourselves together fast.

That aside: keep what Senku and Ai said in mind when making purchases when our points roll around; one thing you can never have enough of is supplies, and it never hurts to be overprepared.

And that's what we're gonna have to be. Call it instinct, or intuition, or whatever, but it wouldn't be my first time, and I'm pretty sure that applies to a lot of you too.

Take care of each other. Nita, out.

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Nita, I did climb the mountain, but I only received the third memory that belonged to my memory share partner.

I'd like to see that transcript of the memories Enna, Minako, and you received. Or maybe I'll go for the direct memory transfer.

You seem to be implying that you received information that we all need to know because it relates to the Voidtrecker Express and our future. Is that the case? Or am I misunderstanding you?

[Nita's expression is grim; Curufin's hit it right on the money whether he knows it or not.]

I can get you both; come on down to the Standard Coach and I'll get you set, okay?

And no, you didn't misunderstand.

All right, I'll be there in two minutes!

[ He's there in one. He walks up the isle of the Standard Coach and comes to Nita. ]

Okay, where do we start?

[Nita stands up to greet him, though there's not as much smile on her face today.]

It may be best if I show you the memories themselves; you might see something the three of us missed, and transcriptions aren't the best for that.

[ He smiles at his friend Nita, however. He's glad to see her, even if the occasion isn't what either of them might wish. ]

All right, show me the memories themselves. How do we do this?

[In response, Nita simply holds out her hand.]

You give permission for the transfer, that's all. Though - you want them one-at-a-time, or all together, like a movie?

[The 'breather' option best reflected how they'd been shared in the first place; trying to figure out their true chronological order was guesswork.]

[ Curufin reaches for Nita's hand, as that seems to be what she is offering. Presumably, she's a touch-telepath. ]

I give you permission for the transfer. You can give me the memories one at a time, so I can consider them one at a time. [ He nods to tell her to begin. ]

Edited 2020-08-29 00:47 (UTC)

[It's not QUITE that simple, but that explanation's enough for wizardry, at least on this train!

Permission granted, Nita takes his hand, starting with the vision she'd received from the train first - the one of the mission, of seemingly everyone's perspectives and tasks rendered successful.]

... What d'you think of that one, Curufin?

Curufin receives the memory, and in the seconds this takes, his eyes go briefly vacant. And then he's present again.

"It seemed to be about us, the Voidtreckers, and it looked like a successful mission, though I could not really make out all the details, or connect the events. The viewpoint kept shifting. We seemed to be rescuing some children, and we did it with no team losing any members or losing any of the children. I did not quite like those shadowy monsters, though." Wry smile.

"Okay, next memory?"

"If anything, they seemed pretty generic. I recognized some of the people, though - one person from a vision Will Stanton gathered from the engine wall while he'd been here, with strange tattoos on her hands, another person from the train logs: Vian Tail."

The wry smile was returned.

"Alright. Ready."

With that came another hand-clasp, and another memory - the one Enna had received, of a being bodiless and alone.

Curufin may even find the content strangely familiar.

"Oh, I remember that name, Vian Tail. But what was she doing in this vision? Did we go back to the same planet? Or are we going to go in the future?" Curufin scratches his head.

And then comes the next memory, and that one causes him to blink sharply in a startled manner.

"What the hell? I seemed to be without my body, and alone in the dark. But it wasn't the Dark Between the Worlds, at least, not my experience of it. When I was traveling the Dark, all my emotions were intact, whereas in this memory, they were definitely NOT. There was a sense of purpose, though, of having a task to accomplish, a goal to reach. But the vision did not reveal what that was." He shakes his head.

"Next vision, please?"

Nita's response this time was a more grim smile, along with a nod.

"Hold on to your seat, Curufin."

And then she offers her hand, one last time. One last vision...

Curufin absorbs the vision, and as he does so, he jumps back, letting go of Nita's hand. His eyes are wide and dark.

"Stars of Varda!" He almost never swears by the gods of his world, but he'll make an exception for this. "Home of the Voidtrecker Express? What are we seeing, is this the past or the future? I didn't recognize any of those people. They were wearing team uniforms and they were obviously Void Warriors, but they weren't us. And those dark cloud-like shapes that were blocking out the sky, they looked like the same ones as I saw in my vision before that aborted mission more than four months ago." He's still counting in Earth months, not Voidtrecker months.

"And I saw those ominous shapes again just before the train pulled us out of there. If the train had experiences of those dark clouds back in its past, then that would explain why it fled as soon as they showed up. And in that memory I just saw, the Void Warriors were yelling at their leaders to take them back, to give them a chance to defeat those shadowy beings. The same way I and some other people yelled at the train for aborting the mission. Only in the memory, the leader agrees and gives the order to return. And we don't know what happened. Except, obviously, the Voidtrecker Express wasn't destroyed."

Nita thinks about reminding Curufin how she was able to recognize two of them - but that's not the important thing here.

"And before, when there were all those dreams... those shapes broke a world in that last dream, too."

She'd been the first to remind Zelda of that fact, herself, before the aborted mission Curufin was discussing.

"... And the people were destroyed, or rendered out of time, or worse. Going by that second memory, there was only one survivor, though I'm still not sure who-or-what that survivor was."

"Yes, those cloudy beings broke the world in my dream vision before the aborted mission, and then they broke a world in the memory you just transmitted to me. We know that the Voidtreckers in the memory went back and found the wreckage of that world, and that they decided to go back again. I'm guessing that last go back meant time travel, that thing that was possible but not allowed, and risky. They must have done it. But the memory ends there."

He considered Nita's comment. "Yes, the memory of the lonely person floating in darkness, that could have been the sole survivor of that fatal mission. I wonder? Could it have been the Voidtrecker Express itself? We don't know anything, really, about the train's history, nor do we really know what kind of being it is."

Again Nita nods, agreeing as she doesn't yet know of anything to contradict his theory.

"It's not as if it'll answer those questions in words. I wonder if it even can, now."

"I've long wondered if the train is capable of communicating with us in a more human fashion than it currently does. It certainly can put words and sentences together to make announcements to us, and it surely understands us when we make requests or comments to it. Maybe it can, in fact, have a conversation but simply chooses not to."

He keeps thinking. "If that's the case, then maybe there is a reason, and maybe that reason has something to do with the train's past history. Maybe. . . if the train is an intelligent, feeling being, then perhaps it was traumatized by losing its crew, and it fears to become emotionally involved with us now. Maybe that's why it continues with its vocation of being Void help but doesn't connect with us any more than it has to, to carry out the missions."

He smiles a little. "Sounds like a science fiction novel, doesn't it?"

"A different kind of trauma... but still cutting."

Not wanting to connect to people - true, Nita had dealt with depression, but imagining that scaled up... it was almost beyond her.

Still, the description makes her snort. "Hopefully not a parable about being careful who you reach out to."

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Grasshopper 30, Video to Everywhere from Standard, 'Afternoon'

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[Action] CW: discussion of a world's destruction, for the rest of this thread

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