Amsterdam, Netherlands, European Union
June 29th, 2352
[Sciphol Station]
Spoiler: "I'll see you at the horizon."
He didn't talk about what happened in the Relay. Everyone else did, though. He could see the newspapers at the stands, the delightful calling of breaking news from speakers - waiting for you to drop a pence in and have it uploaded to your reader. He couldn't stomach looking at it. It was clinical. Death reports, factual mistakes, police investigation, anything one would want to know about the event.
Rumours abounded, of course. Questions of terrorism, of accidents, of blaming. He was not one of them. They held him for questioning and let him go, especially as they saw him shake and wretch, convulsing at the memories. All his energy had bled out for fourteen long, painful days. He couldn't keep it going.
When he looked down at his hands, he could see the disease, the blood that he would seem to never be rid of. The bile - not his. Oh, no, it's never that simple. The longer he looked, the worse things felt. When he closed his eyes, those feelings rushed back to him. That's all they were, though. Feelings.
And that hurt worst of all. It couldn't hurt him anymore. When he was in danger, that was enough. He kept going, he couldn't stop to look at the bodies, the screaming, the desperation, the pleas. How many people did he pass, left there, crying out for help, mercy, or just simple acknowledgement of their humanity?
And now their pleas were all rushingly acknowledged, at the last moment, in his mind. It was the scale of things that ruined him. Individual suffering was comprehendible, you could extract something out of it. This was just a genocide. So much of everything - like a hospital burning down in Lahore, maybe. He'd imagine it'd feel the same. The heat on their faces, as the firebombs rain down around them, the sirens going off, the infernal screeching, barely rising above the screams of the patients. The noble few who tried, lay dying just like the rest of them.
He's heard it before. He's seen it before. But... there were so many. One death isn't a tragedy. A million isn't a statistic. It... confuses, it muddles the true scale of it, the meaningless of it all, the chaos, the stench of the dead filling the Relay.
He could feel himself puke into the trash can, but there was never any stopping the thoughts. He wiped his face with a shaky hand in a jacket sleeve.
"Once a winner, always a winner."
That's the quote he would never get out of his mind. The meaning, of course, was a complicated thing. But he survived a fucking slaughterhouse, he won, in a way. Just like how all those fifteen survivors on the Raft of Medusa survived. He understood now on both ends. He believed he never had to understand. But now...
Well. If there was any truth in the dying saying, he felt that it had reached its limit. The rush of survival paled to having to live through it. He shakily lifted his head up, up to the station.
One last train ride home. He never thought he'd so truly regret every step of the way.
This game used a modified (and perhaps mildly complex) stat system. I'll break it down in the spoiler:
Spoiler: STATS
Stats are your all rounder areas - good for everything, but it's not exactly specialised one way or another. These are the most broadly useful.
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STR: 0 | VIT: 0 | FAE: 0
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ATH: 0 | ------- | INT: 0
STRENGTH determines how hard you hit, and how well you carry and use armour or heavy equipment
VITALITY determines how well you survive being hit and your life in general.
FATE determines willpower and to a lesser degree, luck.
ATHLETICS determines general speed.
INTELLIGENCE determines general knowledge, intuition, and you gain one skill point at INT +3, INT +5, and so on.
COMBAT
Combat talents, if you will, determine how effective you are with each class of weapon. +5 is good, -5 is comical for your rolls.
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DLT: 0 | BLT: 0 | AIM: 0 | CQC: 0
DUELIST determines how good you are with pointy things.
BLT determines how good you are with non-pointy things.
AIM determines how accurate you are and is useful if you like ranged attacks.
CQC determines how well you fight with your hands and feet.
SKILLS
Skills function essentially as stat checks - there is no way to 'fail' a skill check like you could with a roll. Someone with Medical 2 will get better results than someone with Medical 0 every time. These will crop up across the game as stat checks for rewards or other options. Failure can be harmful, success can be quite a boon.
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MED: 0 | MEC: 0 | MOB: 0 | SCI: 0
MEDICAL determines how well you work at fixing and healing people. It also determines your knowledge in general with advanced medical equipment - and if it is useful for some reason, how well you understand the human body.
MECHANIST determines how well you understand industrial equipment. Crafting items and using stuff located around the game requires the mechanist skill.
MOBILITY determines your general agility and performing acrobatic feats, getting into small places, and the ability to move better when wounded. It temporarily becomes a combat skill for dodging, but should on affect how it's being rolled.
SCIENTIST determines your understanding of advanced equipment - highly scientific weapons or hacking computers doesn't come with an instruction manual, after all.
Signups will still occur on May 22nd at 3PM central time, though I will warn ahead of time and say the game starting itself might be delayed due to my finals being shifted (again). I will do everything in my power to make sure that doesn't occur, however.
See you May 20th for the final teaser, finalised signup details, and more information on the game. :)