Welcome to Gaia! ::

December, 1686

Deep in the Tanami desert, in the ruins of what-once-was, a thing walks where nothing should.

Beneath the relentless sun, its gigantic shadow cuts a swath of starry darkness across a cerulean sky. It is too vast and too strange to be man or mortal. It is an anomaly. It is FEAR.

For a long time, the thing has been so tired. It aches for slumber down in its old, old, core. It wants to dream until there are none left. To sink itself into the memories of humans, to take residence in a den of its own design, where no one will bother it.

So it looks. The thing reaches through the veil where it is weakest, a cold hand searching for a place dead but not gone. A place with echoes of human life. A place remote.

A long hunt that, for some time, proves unfruitful. But the thing pursues its quarry with dogged determination, for years. For decades.

But now it is here. It scents like home: stale sorrow, old blood. Fear.

As it approaches the former home of the white-coat mortals, its shape shrinks from monstrous and amorphous into something almost like a man. Waves of galaxy-ridden tendrils retract and form into hair. Limbs too long and with too many joints reshape themselves into a semblance of normality. It's skin, wet and shining like gelatinous ooze, solidifies.

Its blank face grows no features.

Laying a gentle hand upon the walls, it watches without eyes as the metal rusts at the contact, oxidizing without a hiss. The stone crumbles, a parapet falls with a crash, cobblestone returning to dust.

It belongs to the Dreams now, this base. All of its dusty rooms and lurking creatures, all of its memories of what-once-was.

The air grows heavy around the thing, and its force-- its FEAR-- ripple out in a shockwave. The hour has struck twelve but the skies are dark now, an infinite night sealing the base’s perimeter.

Easy to enter. Impossible to leave.

All of its power bleeds into the world where it should not be, leeching into the water and the soil. It has so little left inside: the legacy is in the nest, not the Walker. That is how it is. That is how it always has been.

It is so tired. Sleep eternal draws nearer. Down it burrows, down and down, until it is deep beneath the sands, beneath the structure of the ruins. Slowly, it curls smaller until it is in its most intangible form, settling into the first Dream of many.

Outside the base, all looks well. Clouds bloom on one side of the ruins, a sandstorm on the other. There is no hint of the darkness inside. Of the one individual slowly disappearing into dust. Of the FEAR hiding inside this pocket of where time grows inconsequential as more of it passes.

But it is there.

The Dreaming Void slumbers, and the gravitational pull around the base grows stronger, inch by inch. Shadows insignificant approach it and are enveloped. All that enter doe not leave.

For decades, for centuries.

This changes.

Felicia pops through a portal in an airport alley, right by arrivals. It's northern Australia, because there are no airports available closer to the site. It's a twelve hour drive, at least, and that's on road. She's got cash and fake id to buy a Jeep, has been told not to wreck it which, haha, it's funny because she's half Chinese and a girl, right? Right.

With her she's got three gigantic roller suitcases full of tender, tender equipment. She has it on good authority that it’s worth more than her life. So Felicia drags them tender-like towards a cab and grins her crooked grin. Car dealership, please.

She used to like driving, before. Sort of wandered around from place to place anyway, and if she hadn't needed ethernet Felicia would have had no qualms living in a car. Rolling down the windows, she sticks her arms out as she drives down the highway all by herself, not a soul around for miles.

It's not the same as riding a motorcycle, but. She'll take it.

Driving has always been exhausting. She quantifies driving rather than riding because very little is more exhilarating than exploring atop her Kawasaki, cranking up the speed and taking every turn too hard, too fast, balancing enthusiasm and physics on a knife's edge. Driving, though, towards what feels like her own impending failure, is…

Different.

Very
She takes stock of the ruins in the last few hours of the day, racing against the clock to ensure she's not setting up camp near some sort of ******** horrific nest of snakes. Or shadow snakes. Or both. With Scrawl summoned and a headlamp on, Felicia explores every room, every nook, every cranny. The fear readings on her devices stay active but low-- if anything is here, it is concealing itself well enough to be hidden to her.

A thought that is both comforting and disturbing at the same time.

By the end, she's coated in dust and sand from head to toe, the grit of it stuck in her wild hair, beneath her nails, in her boots. But the base and all of its crumbling stone are free of anything blatantly dark and spooky.

Good enough.

She's been allotted a maximum of three weeks to get her work done, with travel time included. One day had been devoured by the drive, and that left her twenty days to get the base back up and running on barebones. Felicia's job was not to rebuild, not to do the work that a horde of Moon hunters would do after she'd done her work.

No.

It was worse.

She pulls out a notebook and grimaces-- she's always hated physical text, too used to a keyboard, too used to the ability to erase her mistakes-- and examines the physical printout of her mission's requirements.

It sounded so easy, on paper. She was to re-activate portals, pendants, and communications, then blip back home with a beam me up Scottie, easy as you please. Felicia underlines the words in red pen with a heavy hand, her brows furrowed.

That's the endgame, not the level grind. To do anything involving runics involved turning all her programming knowledge on its side. Runic is a language unlike any other, a living codebase full of interpretations and putting actual blood, sweat and tears into the creation of every new module, every new and individual rune.

It's her job to retrace the steps of those that came before, to fill in the blanks where she can by repairing them, and when she fails, to craft new ones with Life division equipment. Her learnings are not so advanced yet that she can craft her own unique interpretations of the world and how to bend it, not yet in tune enough with runes to bring the essence of her energy to an event horizon, not yet focused enough to bind it all into a new shape.

Turning the page, tired brown eyes scan messy notes, both typed and hand-scrawled. All of that was the after. She had about four days to do the before.

Warmth, water, sleep, food. Those are the four basics of survival, and she had two down already. Considering she'd already inspected the perimeter-- and walked away satisfied that the grounds were free of the truly detrimental threats-- the threat of danger was minimal and essentially put out of her mind.

After the four came shelter, a power source, and basic repairs.

Felicia tore into an MRE, heating the boring spaghetti and meatballs in their packet. Scowling, she realized:

Real work sucked a**.