The Humming: A choice to be Made

[navi_no]

Who: YOU! Everyone on the Noanga.
Duration: Day 79 (Feb 5 - 6)
WARNINGS: INSECTS (Bees and Wasps). Baby Bee Mercy Killings if people go down that path. Hard Choices to be made.

THE HUMMING

The Start of it all

At first, the Hum is barely noticeable to most people. A vibration underfoot. A sound you feel more than hear. A low, omnipresent sound that settles into the bones.

No one can quite agree what it is. Some swear it’s insects, yet others insist it’s machinery. A few claim it’s neither and won’t finish the thought.

The Flerken Kittens have begun sleeping constantly, curling into tight balls as if to escape the sound, while the Replicators shake under the resonance, turning everything fizzy; water, juice, tea, even milk.

Glasses buzz in hands. Metal sings if you listen too closely.

And then the observatories catch it.

It being a massive derelict hive-ship drifts into view. It's easily the size of the Noanga. Scans reveal the following: No power signatures. No active life signs. No response to hails. It is dead and silent.

Except for the Hum.

The sound aligns perfectly with its trajectory.

Characters feel an inexplicable pull to investigate - not panic, not urgency, just a persistent sense of unfinished business.

On Board the Hive-Ship.

Inside, the ship is a mix of organic and metal and is brittle with age, like a sneeze could tear it apart.

Chambers once meant for warmth and care are cold, while honeycombed walls are littered with collapsed cells and the air vibrates faintly, like grief trapped in a lung. The are signs of a fight all around. Bee-kin bodies -stingless bees, to be exact, looking far more like bees than people - litter the ship. All dead. But they are not the only insects - wasp bodies can be found. They're smaller and far more numerous.

It would seem, they tried to invade this civilian Hive-ship.

It's eerie and quiet, silent in ways a ship like this shouldn't be and the entire ship, the crew soon discover, is a bee-nest, and the source of the Humming is discovered deep within the brood-holds:

Hundreds of dying bee-kin larvae in various stages of life. They alone are spared the horrors of the wasps, but were they really? It's hard to tell what's worse. Death by wasp, or this.

The larvae are about 9ft long. They are bio-luminescent and they are starving. Their combined distress creates the resonance bleeding into realspace.

They cannot be saved. Well, not all of them can be.

The Choice.

At the heart of the ship lie three queen larvae. They are vast, easily 12 feet long, half-formed, surrounded by the mutilated remains of attendants and wasp invaders long since dead.

Two choices lay before you:

They can be saved, but time is of the essence. Or, they can be mercy killed and the brood-ship left to its fate amongst the countless wrecks of space.

The outcome of this event re: the Queens rests solely on player choice and will be revealed once all votes have been cast. To cast the vote (One vote per character), go to this thread.

Loot & Rewards

Biomaterials (chitin alloys, resonance fibres, wax-crystal composites, etc. Think organic tech.)
Insect-based clothing styles and fabrics.
Salvageable organic tech components
Etc. It's a civilian ship run by very big bees. Get freaky if you wish.
Optional memorial or preservation logs

code bases by tricklet

Comments

VOTING

[navi_no]

Cast ONE vote per Character for the following:

Option A: The Mercy Killings
The Queen larvae are put out of their misery and destroyed. The brood-line ends here, and the Humming starts to fade.

The hive-ship becomes truly silent in the hours that follow and the Flerken Kittens wake, unsettled but safe.

Option B: Salvation
The queens are fed royal jelly - rare, difficult, resource-intensive; there is enough to be found throughout the ship to stabilise the larvae until they hatch ten days later.

The brood-line survives. Changed, diminished, but alive as the Humming fades gradually, like a held breath released. The ship enters a dormant recovery state as it continues to drift through space. It may be guided behind the Noanga for up to 20 days, but the new sister-Queens will want to take the Hive somewhere safe.

The Flerken Kittens wake calmer than before, oddly affectionate and clingy. The smell of bees is like catnip to them.

Option A: The Mercy Killings

[managerbehindthrone]

...

Option B: Salvation

[under_the_raptors_wings]

(Since he wouldn't be on the hive ship, you can skip counting his vote if you'd like. Just tossing it in since I feel like at least some chars would know how he'd vote)

Option B: Salvation

[burstingstars]

He might not get onto the ship himself, but it's no question that he disapproves of any and all killing.

Option B: Salvation

[kosmonautilus]

New friends!

OPTION B: SALVATION

[edochiano]

Genta's AU canon has often, if not always, been about taking the hard path - aka the one of rescue - and this certainly won't be any different. Even before knowing there's a solution, he'll insist on finding one, potentially even defending the larvae from others intending a mercy kill if need be!

OPTION B: SALVATION

[oceanbear]

After a lot of internal debate, Emporio chooses life; it isn't fair, that if he can struggle and pull through, something else can't have the chance. More than that, while he can't recognize the distress call as a distress call necessarily, one of his Pokemon likely can- and how can he ignore Killroy on that, huh?

There's something inherently wrong he feels, in giving up because something is hard. People no longer with him taught him that.

Option B: Salvation

[mystic_mongoose]

Mina does not like killing, even if it’s mercy. She’s going to save these bugs no matter what!

Option B: Salvation

[iobairt]

Maya thinks they could be saved.

Also a crew like this once saved her; time to pay it forward.

[uzerotwo]

Zero Two would ask about how they can actually take care of these things instead of just prolonging their suffering. If the others can convince them they aren't just making things worse because they can't stomach killing then it'll vote for B
otherwise it probably won't vote

Option B: Salvation

[silverhealer]

Ferlarys gravitates more towards vertebrates but won't just leave these beings to die even if she doesn't know how to save them. I'm sure someone can tell her about the royal jelly thing, even if it turns out to be hive insect in the jungle.

Option B: Salvation

[starcrossedscoundrel]

Bioware wrote most of his canon he's used to choices like this.

Even at the height of his "pragmatic, self-serving merc" phase, Abric never leaves a kid to die.

Option B: Salvation

[bestbrotherever]

Loki will make all sort of excuses about how it's not being soft-hearted, it's actually the most practical course of action, the bees could be useful, they need allies... But deep down it's because a lot of people he cares about would be very disappointed if he didn't try to save the bees.

Questions

[navi_no]

Yes, if you really, really want to, you can save/adopt a baby worker/drone bee. They grow to adulthood fast though - about a year.

[uzerotwo]

are the characters able to interface with the tech on the ship at all?

[navi_no]

Yes! It's a bit strange, but interfacing with it is do-able.

[bestbrotherever]

Do build on that, how much can they repair? And what information can they get from the computer banks?

[navi_no]

A fair bit can be repaired, as the ship was a civilian bee-hive, basically. You could probably use the bee bodies as organic matter for repairs.

The information is standard to what one would expect from a civilian generational ship that was crossing through Federation Space; it was intending to stop somewhere in the Merchant’s Commonwealth and was on its third generation - the queen Larvae are the third set of Queens to be hatched on the ship.

The AI is useful, but less Actual AI with a personality and more of a very powerful look-up service. It does have a cute flower avatar, though, and it can tell you the Wasps, near as the ship knows, came out of nowhere.

[bestbrotherever]

Loki will start with instruction manuals for system repairs and care of larvae. After a cursory look to see if there's any evidence of the bees enslaving or eating non-bees on their ships. After that he'll want to see how much of the ship's databanks can be copied to Noanga's, focusing on its star charts and records of worlds and species met.

[uzerotwo]

what sort of information/data can they get out of it? and does it have any sort of ai to question?

[navi_no]

The information is standard to what one would expect from a civilian generational ship that was crossing through Federation Space; it was intending to stop somewhere in the Merchant’s Commonwealth and was on its third generation - the queen Larvae are the third set of Queens to be hatched on the ship.

The AI is useful, but less Actual AI with a personality and more of a very powerful look-up service. It does have a cute flower avatar, though, and it can tell you the Wasps, near as the ship knows, came out of nowhere.

[uzerotwo]

Zero Two would ask it about what sort of ship this was, where it came from and where it was going and what happened. They later if it thinks they can save the Queen Larva/what it will do if they do (will they be able to fly it, etc)

Network Text, OTA

[burstingstars]

Day wasn't about to leave Aen'kae alone anytime soon, but something had to be done about this.

"This noise, vibration, whatever is really messing with Aen'kae. Anyone know the cause? If this is someones science or magic experiment gone wrong, stop it right now."

The frustration of not being able to help more shines through here.

On Board - OTA

[kosmonautilus]

The humming is something he disregarded as merely another noise, on a different level. Nothing to concern himself with. Now the strange ship is a whole different matter, Lucas needing no pull to go investigate right away, to be one of the first aboard. Curious at first, the combed wall structures reminding him of the webbed spider ships he loves to travel in. He’s never seen a bee or wasp in his life, but they do remind him of the spiders somewhat. The dead don’t bother him too much nor does the derelict ship – such is life. Fights happen. Things break and then you fix them.

The dying are a different matter. It might’ve been the spiders that united their species, but his kind had felt deeply for the one human they knew, had laughed at jokes they didn’t understand. And here are a people that are new and exciting, that could be friends to make and they are dying and might be gone forever soon. They are humming and glowing, communicating in ways he doesn’t understand and he is deeply upset by their demise.

Lucas will try talking to the larvae, finding bright colors to match their glowing, ones that tell of calm and not being alone and being sorry. He’ll eventually resort to bring someone else from their crew over, drag them by the arm if he has to, the message on his slate only showing “Help them!”. It’s not a request.

[bestbrotherever]

Loki's exploring the ship himself, so Lucas won't need to fetch him. But he shakes his head sadly at Lucas's slate. "I am afraid... most of them are beyond help." The scene is one of animal violence, but the ship is so clearly built for and by intelligent beings, he can't shake the feeling that he's walking through a destroyed village, worse than any he'd seen while adventuring with Thor and his friends.