phantasmalrift | making this cold harbor now home

Who: Sawbones Jetshard and open!
What: Several around-the-station open prompts, first week of March.
Warnings: Third prompt involves blood and routine medical testing.

A - March 2, Common room, ~1 A.M.

[It's still a little surprising to Jetshard how quiet it is in the middle of the night around here; it's not unheard of for others to be up and around at this hour, of course, but in a troll community the aftermidnight hours would be the busiest part of the day.

Anyway, it feels vaguely antisocial to spend too much time shut up in her quarters, even if her sleeping schedule doesn't seem to coincide with most others', so she's currently camped out in the common room, sitting crosslegged on one of the couches with a large, dense book open in her lap and her tablet computer balanced on one knee. Ever so often, she taps something into the tablet.]

B - March 5, East Residential Hallway, ~7 P.M.

Aw, shit, no...

[The exclamation - more disappointed than alarmed, almost resigned - is accompanied by a faint clatter from inside the open door of Apartment #1. A smallish disk-shaped robot with a largish knife taped to the top trundles out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen - maybe a bit faster than might be expected of a troll roomba. A moment later, Jetshard follows, stocking-foot and damp haired. She looks both ways at the door before spotting the device and giving chase. Hopefully it hasn't found any ankles yet...?]

C - March 7, Medbay, ~9 P.M.

[Jetshard sits on the edge of a cot in the medical bay, a combination of her own kit and some supplies she's scrounged up in here spread out next to her. She's turned away from the door; although she hasn't bothered to pull the curtains and hide herself from view, she's also kind of sheilding what she's doing with her body as she draws a vial of jade-green blood from her arm.

There's no real reason why she needs to be in here for this, except that there's something comforting about keeping medical things to the medical bay. It feels... safer somehow. Less vulnerable.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'd be most confident if I had the chance to perform a dissection or two - or even a vivisection - but I haven't exactly got a great wealth of potential subjects for that, and book learning is much, much better than nothing.

[She shrugs.] Well, we've got our share of brutes... but given that I don't know what a youkai is, it could just be a coincidence of how this place translates everything.

It's kind of a catchall term for all sorts of supernatural beings. And I have to explain it every single time because apparently there's more nuance to it than the thingy can handle.

[Basically monsters, except pretty much guaranteed intelligent. By a very loose definition of "intelligent", if one includes fairies, but they're numerous enough that they tend to just be called that.]

Still, I think all of us can agree that it would be better not to kill each other in the name of science.

Well, I'm not particularly supernatural. Just a different ecosystem's kind of natural. [She's not entirely sure that she believes that Alternia and its spacegoing sapient species truly harbors anything supernatural. Paranormal, certainly, and disease processes that render the border between life and death highly questionable. And around here the supernatural is in pretty blatant evidence. But back home, magic is a fake thing, she's pretty sure.]

[It would largely depend who you ask.]

Hmmm... that's a solid viewpoint. Gensokyo doesn't have any ocean around it; it's been a very long time since I've seen anything like what's outside the station here.

So what does the ecosystem look like where you're from?

Mmm. Harsher than here. Intense solar radiation, dramatically varying seasonal conditions. A lot of the fauna is highly aggressive, and a non-negligible portion of the flora, as well.

[She sighs, and shakes her head, smiling.] Which I'm aware makes it sound less than hospitable, and it can be a dangerous place.

It certainly does, but that's just the way nature works. Although I'm wondering what would make the sun more powerful... there was an incident in Gensokyo a couple years ago in which someone was planning to use the power of the sun to conquer the surface and turn it into another Hell of Blazing Fires. I was only involved in an advisory capacity, but even just being able to talk to the person that resolved it I could still tell it was far too hot down there.

[Aaand it would seem that this is yet another conversation that has taken a hard left turn into weird magic shit.] ...well, from a purely scientific viewpoint, it's easily enough explained by variations between the stars in question, or the orbital radii of the planets, or atmospheric conditions... or more likely some combination thereof.

What, what do the stars have to do with this?

[Guess what weird magic stuff doesn't do? That's right, it's "not recognize the sun as a star".]

I mean, in Gensokyo it's understood now that the power of the sun is something called "nuclear fusion", which is now being used for various purposes, but...

[Well, at least she's got some understanding of the nature of her own sun. That's not nothing, Jetshard supposes.]

Stars are suns, at a much greater distance. They don't all have planets orbiting them, but many do, and of those, some have planets that can support life.

[It's a strange place. By all accounts it doesn't make sense, and depending on the interpretation that may in fact be the point.]

Sounds fake to me. The significance between them is totally different...

You can think it sounds like whatever you like.

[Jetshard shrugs.]

I've seen my native planet's sun from the surface of... [She pauses, idly ticking off something on her fingers for a moment.] ...planets in seven other solar systems. The only thing that set it apart from any of the other stars in the sky as that our navigational charts told us that star was the one with the planet where we'd been hatched.

Oh, so it's more like... "this one's our star; there are many like it, but this one is mine", so it's special?

[She smiles.] That's a good way to put it. We're not immune to sentimentality, I guess.

There's a lot to be said for sentimentality. Duels in Gensokyo revolve around it, in at least one sense; it's less the act of attacking and more the feelings put into it that actually decide a win or a loss.

["Combatants may not deliver attacks that do not have meaning. The meaning itself becomes the attack's power." - Original draft of Spell Card rules.]

Interesting. I suppose that would keep spurious challenges to a minimum? I've known people who'd be much less trigger-happy if they actually had to mean something by it every time they fought.

In practice, no, it doesn't exactly work out that way, but that's because the attacks don't need to reflect your reason for fighting; mine certainly don't... most of the time.

[She doesn't have a card called "Aya Shameimaru's Coercive Reporting" for nothing.]

making this cold harbor now home

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