This is an in-character thread. It is for characters to just sort of mill around and interact with one another. (If you want to have something more action-y going on, please make your own thread.)
Raven stands around in the town square, looking around and waiting for something interesting to happen.
Something interesting does indeed happen. One of the many, many tunnels in the city opens near the town square. Someone has put plants around the outside, and someone else has put a toy windmill in there. Out of the tunnel, blinking in the sunlight, comes a dragon. "...this wasn't here earlier."
Raven watches as the dragon creature pops out of the tunnel. He walks over, waving cheerfully. "It wasn't?" Raven asks. "When did they put it in?"
The dragon blinks. "I don't know. When I came here, all this air wasn't here, either." They pause, lean down, and nip off a tiny bit of fern.
"I don't know for certain honestly, I only just got to town." Raven said as he leaned back against a lamp post. "How long have you been here?"
The dragon glanced up at the sky. As it was daytime, the stars weren't really visible through the slightly-tinted solar-cell airdome, providing no hints on how long it had been. "I don't know. I arrived when there wasn't anything here but mostly-buried ancient city and lunar rock. Just woke up from hibernation."
(this has been copy pasted) It's...weirdly bright in here. Wherever here is. I raise my hand up to cover my eyes and notice that it doesn't do much of anything. Then again, that might be because my hand doesn't quite exist. It's sort of a grey, dotted outline. I look around where I am and don't see anything. A thick mist has covered my surroundings. Suddenly, I feel a huge range of feelings as my nerves come into existence. I feel a tail spring into being behind me. I try to scream out (it really fucking hurts) but I find I don't have a mouth; in fact, I don't have anything at all above my torso, though that's rapidly changing. The dotted line is becoming solid as I become real. As the last part of the line seals up, I cough. I realize I'm quite a fair way in the air. Around me is just sky (as well as a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias). At that moment, physics kicks in, and I start to fall to the ground. I hit the ground with a whump and lose consciousness mere moments after I've gained it.
The dragon spun around, rearing up on their hind legs to try to get a better look at whatever had gone whump. Unfortunately for her, there was a tree in the way, so he didn't see anything.
I wake up. The mist is gone, but there does seem to be something crashing through branches behind me. I spin around and am face-to-face with a dragon. Resisting the urge to yell and scurry away, I try talking. "He-hello?"
"Er...hello?" The dragon pauses for a moment, absent-mindedly sticking their tongue out to lick a fallen leaf off her nose. "Are you alright? And do you know when all this"-he gestured to the trees, grass, and air dome with their left wing-"was put here?" ((what happened to the sperm whale? did it go splat or vanish?))
(((IDK I just wanted to make a Hitchhiker's reference)) "I...I'm okay. And I don't. I just started existing." Now that I think about it, I just started existing. How do I know how to speak? Or do anything? I'm confused. Maybe I can get at least one question out of the way. "Where am I?"
"I can answer that question." Raven still hadn't moved from the lamp post he was leaning on. "You're in Kintsugi, a fairly new, and small colony on the moon of a gas giant planet." "Are you okay? That was quite a fall. I know there's a doctor around here somewhere."
The dragon shrugs. "A town, apparently. It wasn't here when I went into the tunnels. Well, some of it was. But there was no air." Another pause. "...first major moon of the first gas giant in a binary star system, about fifty light years from the star I came from. The moon has another moon."
Days can be pretty relative on a planet with a day/night cycle that's a bit too long for most species. While it was the designated daytime as per the convention of the settlement and the city was lit accordingly, the two stars were on the other side of Kintsugi, and the surface outside of the air domes was bathed only in the dim magenta planetshine of Plenet, and even dimmer moonmoonlight. Was. For a few seconds, a line lights up across the sky, shining bright white. It isn't much, just enough to be visible from the lit-up air domes of the colony. After all, it was only a third of this small personal ship that was annihilated by the FTL drive failure. The line steadily decreases in brightness as it expands. The lack of any significant unidirectional lateral movement tells any attentive observer who knows the physics of hyperspace drives that the cloud of gas and debris is likely moving either directly towards or directly away from them, probably at high speeds. In this case, said attentive observer is safely behind a protective magitech barrier and can thus simply look up and hope for some nice fireworks. Sure enough, two minutes after the blast, hundreds of tiny fireballs light up in the sky as the debris hit the Great Wall of Nope. Most of them stop dead in their tracks in a split second and start slowly fading away. One of them, seemingly slightly bigger though much dimmer than the others, keeps moving and disappears behind the crater walls. Several seconds later, the ground in the colony slightly shakes and a rumble is heard.
Above Raven's shoulder a small orb about the size of a golf ball appeared, light bending around it and rippling in waves as it doubled in size. The orb was plain white, with light blue glowing lines etched across its surface. Light shimmered and rippled in front of Raven's face as a small holographic display appeared, seemingly from nowhere, showing a map, with coordinates marked in red just outside the colony dome. Words poured into Raven's mind, relayed through the ansible hanging above his shoulder. "Infinte Leap to captain, a hyperspace detonation consistent with a failing drive core has been detected. Majority of debris intercepted by defensive structure identified as "Great wall of Nope" penetration detected at one point. Coordinates relayed via ansible for your convenience." The coordinates were still smoking in the live feed from the ships cameras. ((if we go out to investigate, we'd probably want a thread specifically for it.))
