sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] Post-Bunker Support Group

[MINGLE] Post-Bunker Support Group

WHO: Mark Watney
WHERE: Town Hall & Inn
WHEN: 6 September 2018, Evening
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Warn on your threads, please. PTSD is probably a given.
NOTES: Support group mingle! If your character needs some support after the latest meta plot or just generally, send them on over to Town Hall. Also, feel free to do top levels having to do with signing up for a tube monitoring shift. Please let me know if you want a Mark thread, I have notifs off for the post.

So, I have been down to what we all seem to be collectively calling the Bunker. It is... something, to say the least.

For some people it feels like hope and for others despair, and I can honestly see both sides of it. Some people need to feel like they have some control, even if it's illusory — Having a puzzle to possibly solve makes them feel less adrift. For others, it's too much reality, or the perception of, anyway. I can't say I'm personally convinced by any of it.

See, I've been here since the start of whatever this is, with a group that's almost entirely gone now. It's been five months since we were birthed into this expanded world, and I don't know if it's any more real than the last. That isn't me putting on a tin foil hat, that's just respecting the environment. Mars was the same way: You do what you need to do to eke out a life, to survive or even thrive, but it's dangerous to think you have any real control. Everything can go to shit in the blink of eye, and then you're tumbling around in an airlock while your entire food supply is turned to dust.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying people should stop hoping to get home, stop trying to figure it all out. I'm just saying we might all be a little easier mentally if we could express how scary it is to know, deep down, that the rug can be pulled out from under us at any moment... And then to accept that feeling that way is okay.

With that in mind, after a little meditating during my daily work in the fields, I put up two notices on the blackboard in the South Village inn:

Volunteers to monitor the bunker tubes for new arrivals, please sign up for a shift on the paper on the bar.

That's one thing we can do, at least. Just the illusion of control, but still important to some people, and definitely helpful for anybody new.

Below that:

Support Group Tonight
Town Hall - 7:00 PM
Everyone Welcome

I don't know how many people will actually show — We've got a surprisingly stubborn, resilient group, in my experience. But even if it helps just one person, it's worth doing.

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Integrating into society is getting a few false starts: first he has to check from his bedroom window, or peer over the stairs at the breakfast crowd, to make sure he's not doing anything obviously out of fashion with sundry clothing items. Then he has to do a lot of nodding and smiling in the downstairs, glad the fare and silverware are simplified from what he's used to, rather than foreign.

He has no idea what patch of woods they're in. He's still shaky on science, as a concept. As a word. There's a growing list of them in the margins of the journal he'd scavenged, and often as not when he's taking notes near groups of people, he's writing I don't know in a scrawl, linked in the loops of his handwriting until they run off the page. Litanies are good, fine. Eventually it'll have a rhythm, and he'll at least be distracted, if still uncertain.

There's no real aim in sitting next to the boy; he thinks the meeting is something to do with how he got here, and the place it happened in. He'd told John, it seemed like a surprise to them. He'd also wondered if they weren't the ones responsible for it all, putting on a show. Hearing a few people out, he might cross that off the list, but first, he's taking diligent notes to make some sense of later. "Crab party," he murmurs, finishing the quote. That it stands out, and comes from so close, has him looking up briefly.

"Well, I suppose I can forgive you if you invite me to any crab parties in the future." Brow raised, it's a first step to admitting he has no idea what any of them are talking about.

Oh man, this guy had been in a tube. Well, technically, Peter guesses they were all probably in a tube at some point, but Peter had seen this guy in one, unconscious and floating, blithely unaware of the crapstorm about to come down on his head. If it hadn't involved dying, Peter might've thought he'd be better off staying asleep.

"It wasn't my party," Peter clarifies. "I mean, I guess it was technically everybody's party, it was like a pot luck, but I didn't organize it. That guy did." He points to Mark at the head of the room. "I don't know anything about crabs."

Technically not true; he knows plenty about crabs. But he feels pretty confident that he shouldn't be trusted with cooking one.

Crossing his arms over the open journal, pen flicking in idle fingers, Cael tilts his head to let his hair gather over the opposite shoulder. "Well, you know things to be sorry about saying, and that's a start."

Or a middle, or an end, depending on how regretful it was to say the first time. "Personally, I know two things about crabs. The first is that they're delicious; the second is that they tend to pull each other down when you put them in a pot."

He looks around at the odd assortment in the hall, some with things to say, some brooding in corners. "Assuming we're all testing our emotional temperatures tonight, what's the usual if things approach boiling?"

When he looks up during the comparison, it is definitely the very casual, I am entertaining a quaint mental image where we doom one another sort of break from eye contact.

"A lot of yelling," Peter replies, but his mouth tugs down the moment after. Really the only person doing much yelling last time — The only time — things got to that point was him.

"But that doesn't happen often. And so far nobody's pulled anybody else down into the pot."

Cael looks at him, several beats longer than the silence should stretch. Generally, if there's nothing clever to say--but that's the problem these past few days. There are plenty of clever things to day, and nothing to gain from it. In his nodding smiles and his calm retreats, he wants--to seem in this, not above it.

But he can't avoid being new, and he can't avoid what these people saw. The boy seems guileless enough, to take his estimation at its word. "A lot of you seem to have some sense of what that place was, on both sides of the discussion. What does it mean, to you?"

"What, the bunker?" Peter pauses, hedging with a tilt of his head. "I guess some people think we're clones, because of the stuff down there, but I don't buy it." One thing he's picked up on in this place is how random everything isn't. There was nobody down there, hadn't been for ages — Or at least that's what they were supposed to think. And sure, parts of the place had been really rundown, but the things they found there — The tubes, the computers, the blood samples — it all felt really deliberate. And if it was deliberate, that meant it was designed to make them all need this support group.

Elena is the one thing he's not sure about, but he knows for a fact nobody found a body. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and it makes more sense that the Elena in that tube was the same one rather than that she died, they scooped up her body, and then grew a whole new version who remembered it all.

One expects, on new and moving ground, to take some time finding their footing. Cael has had to adjust before, had to learn--but he always felt like he could follow along. People spoke his language, leaned on the same social mores, knew a similar history.

The days following the bunker are like unraveling an illusion. Come with the acute discomfort of not trusting his own senses. He wishes he had the grasp to ask the boy why not, or to press more for what he does think--but he's hung on the language, and the feeling that he didn't see what everyone else had. Strange panels of light, tables covered in marked, matching pieces. Glass tanks embedded in floor and ceiling.

When they speak of it, he can't escape the feeling that he isn't supposed to be here.

"I'm sure it's just the shock," he still hedges, uncoiling slow from that gut-cinching defense of his own ignorance. "And with emotions running high, I understand no one wanting to slow down and go over the basics, but. I'm not really grasping the angle. I don't know what a clone is."

"Oh, sorry," Peter blithely replies. It makes thing more difficult, having to explain himself, but he's started getting used to it. "Like a copy. Another version of you."

Which, he realizes belatedly, is maybe not the best thing to just come out with to someone who only recently showed up in a tube and doesn't know what a clone or maybe even science is, and who may or may not come from a place where you're supposed to kill your doppelganger on sight because they're actually a demon.

At least they're already at a support group.

"That is," a breath: "certainly some much-needed context. Thank you."

His hand doesn't move to write it down--it isn't something he'll forget. Eyes cast to the middle distance of another villager's back. A copy, or a split? The blood and hair could reasonably be the components, or simply what was left over. Phylacteries by which to track or preserve, some essential piece retained.

"In my land there is a prison," he says, careful not to establish his side or opinion of its existence. Adjacent as he feels to even his own concept of after, Vilksir or Vorrena could hold a village of this size, or have its own people attending. "Simulcra, people thought to be the aspects of a god, they're kept and killed there to oppose it.

"There's usefulness, in copies. But," he waves a hand out to the meeting. "How does this serve anyone but ourselves?"

"That's the question of the hour," Peter allows with a faint shrug, hating that he doesn't have a better answer and hating too that he just dumped clones in this guy's lap, but he's not going to miss the opportunity to steamroll on.

"I don't think anybody's actually seen their own clone here. Like, there's not main me and then me who cleans the bathroom and me who scrubs potatoes for lunch. There's just me. But people disappear or die and then come back just like you showed up." Or at least Peter assumes; it seems fair enough to conclude they were all marinating in clone juice down in that bunker before they came out of the fountain.

"I don't mean for chores." Let them both stand accused, if the appropriateness of the conversation can be judged. When the worst wrung of the ladder was sacrificial death, no one really called for the prisoners to take over the cleaning, or the fields. Labor was a use that required the living, a safeguard for as long as one could perform it.

But what a thing it would be, if your body could die and all of you--memories, scars, skills--could wake up in another, a gap of sleep between.

He doesn't even recall the pain or shock of death--only those near misses along the way. "It feels like it means something," he adds, tapping the pen to the edge of his journal. "That we remember. That we know who we are or were at all. They don't just need people, in a place, performing tasks."

"That's what I've been saying," Peter says, and flaps an emphatic hand the guy's way. "It just doesn't fit. That's why I don't really buy into clones as the most likely theory. Or it's part of why, anyway."

Less scientifically, it's difficult for him to believe his life never happened, that the sacrifices he and others made that led them to this place was all just fiction. But also, Thanos explains a whole heck of a lot even if he doesn't explain everything.

"This is all pretty new to us," he adds, in case it wasn't obvious by the need for the support group. "We didn't have a lot of answers before we found that underground complex, and now we just have more questions."

The sudden enthusiasm brooks a smile, perhaps the first of anything but polite greeting since he swam ashore. It's--charming, despite the subject. The boy leans into the discussion without guile, and be it from his old life or this, Cael can appreciate that the village hasn't pressed him into it.

"It's generally better to have questions than answers," he says--and not to appease. "Few of them live up to the journey, and when we let them be the ending--well, everything ends.

"Perhaps that's what this is, mechanics and magic aside. A refusal of an ending."

Somehow, this conversation took a sharp turn away from science and into philosophy before Peter knew what was happening. One of those things he's good at; the other not so much. Cael isn't necessarily wrong, but Peter also can't keep himself from thinking the guy sounds a lot like something that would be on one of May's 'Quote a Day' calendars.

Peter falters, and then lifts both hands in a hapless shrug. "I kind of need to be doing things. Trying to answer questions."

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[MINGLE] Post-Bunker Support Group

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