[OPEN] funeral: humankind is united today

[carnem]

CHARACTERS ▶ All
LOCATION ▶ Throughout Zion
SUMMARY ▶ In the wake of terrible news, Zion rallies around the fallen, drawing from traditions old and new, Real and otherwise.
WARNINGS ▶ PG-13 for language and indications of death and violence
NOTES ▶ Following the Return to Harbour plot (conclusion here), the city gathers to commemorate and say good-bye to the soldiers of the four ambushed ships. Political unease cannot get in the way of paying respects.

▶ Mourning in Zion

It takes three days to prepare for a funeral of this magnitude.

Of course, some may say that the Council spends those three days doing more than running the logistics behind incense and flower supplies. However, whatever other activities might have been involved, all that the people of Zion saw were to be expected: Kamadeva rallying the cooks and the florists, Xolotl reviewing the perimeter defenses despite that it had been done for Truce Week so recently, and the Morrigan calling meetings with the more powerful economic forces of the city to ensure the importance of the occasion was understood. The city will not be brought to a halt, but nor will the Council allow the grieving time to be interrupted by day-to-day bustle and commerce.

So it begins: three days.

PREPARATIONS ◀

For three days, Zionites take turns volunteering or even time away from their work.

The work tables are immense. Flower blankets, that will either fade or burn with crisp and potent sweetness, must be woven by teams of dozens. The spiritual practitioners of the Temples welcome all help in this, but it’s children especially who tend to come and join, running spools of bright thread back and forth and perched on higher stools as they fit new blooms into the growing lattice. Each of the dead will wear one.

Artists work with paints and whittles to create dozens of tiny icons: of beds and tables, luxuries to carry into the afterlife, to burn with those of the dead who are designated for cremation. Other donations are real enough: fruit reaped from the harvest, unleavened breads out in dishes, rolls of herbs, soups, kebobs, and wines. These will be eaten afterward-- the final meal to share.

In dozens of homes and throughout the bazaar, people are otherwise at work. They dip incense, draw pictures of memories drawn from sims, build candles, soak rosewater, tell stories and make songs.

A sand mandala flowers slowly by the entrance of the great cavern, expanding under the patient precision of studied hands. For this work, few are invited, but all are welcome to look at the vivid pattern. Symbols of major religions feature on contrasting fields-- not only the faiths of Earth-that-was, but even of some known only to Matrixes, an artistic decision that perhaps the Council and ZDG officially disagree with but nonetheless do nothing to prevent. Elaborate vegetation-- or is it circuitry?-- and a spiral of birds cavort through the space, and here or there, a pale young man looks through breaks in the vivid pattern. Neo.

SPEECH AND DIRGE ◀

It’s understandable, that when Councilor Brutus arrives for the final ceremony, he draws a few looks askance. He has brought four attendants with him, but the security is implied rather than looming a threat en force. After all, much of the Defense Grid is present and they are expected to behave accordingly, as if anyone living in Zion might be sick enough a soul to foul the funeral with dissent.

Most of the time, the bodies are burned at the same time. But there had been a few Muslims, Christians and other groups. Some of the flower blankets arrive empty, symbolic of a soldier who has since been buried.

It’s not difficult to recognize their families, standing at the fore of the massive gathering. Sometimes it’s a husband or a wife who cries hardest, but it is perhaps the worst to see the children who do not cry at all.

It is Councilor Aries who steps out into the stony platform. Chiron comes with her, Orion by his side. However, the men remain silent as she turns to address the crowd, this time for an event much more somber than the last. “Humankind is united today,” is the beginning of her speech. It has the ring of honesty to it, her face hard with grief, but there are murmurs as she speaks. Little doubt, some in the cavern would disagree, but few will put words to it-- at least, until after Aries has said her piece and the funeral songs fade.

The survivor known as 'Proxy' remains conspicuously absent.

Comments

ᴛᴀᴠᴇʀɴ

[ironwork]

( golden-eyed and lazy, nearby metzger and with somehow less leg room despite more leg, seoraj takes up this suggestion by positioning his drink to mime over it as if it were a skull. metzger's, presumably, in this scenario, being painstakingly dusted by some futuristic archaeologist-- )

'Why do I always get the shit jobs', ( he mourns, in character.

irreverent now, maybe, but no one could have faulted his behaviour at the funeral. )

[hellbrokeloose]

For gods’ sake, Allaway. [ Simon grouses into his cup, muffled, disapproving of the pun. Not the sentiment.

He hasn’t had so much that he needs watching over, but he does look irresponsibly comfortable under the circumstances, at ease amidst low lights and stuffy old seats. ]

If this keeps up, I’m going to have to hire on more muscle for moving bodies.

[onyourfeet]

[ Hey, Cage laughed. Into his beer, mainly. There should not be a lot of laughing happening, right now.

He's lounging too, an ankle kicked up onto knee, a more observant presence than a very vocal one. He watches who enters and who leaves the tavern, and when, both course of habit as well as honest curiousity. It won't be the first time in his relatively short career that he's seen an entire hovercraft crew go down, but never to this scale.

He doesn't know anyone who has. ]

Don't worry, Simon, I'll personally see your carcass dragged home, dressed, flowered, the whole shebang, or else someone'll get suspicious.

[ He sets his cup down. ]

Honestly, my money's on Gwisin's gonna apply as much red tape on every mission out of here for the next five years to preventing anything like this keeping up.

[ironwork]

( the injured look that seoraj affects, cradling one bicep in his hand as if it has been personally wounded by the suggestion his muscles are not currently sufficient to metzger's needs, is pushing it a little - he refrains from verbalizing it, leaning back alongside cage a moment later, pulling a face at his prediction.

at his depressingly plausible prediction. )

Because everyone who wants to piss away our lives-- ( the zdg, the crews, all of those people in floral smoke today, ) --is gonna take a minute and fill it out triplicate first. What with all the unified authority we've got, taking its time to do things right.

( see, it's not that seoraj doesn't have opinions. it's just you only hear them when he's had a beer first, generally speaking. )

ooc: skip me a round

[hellbrokeloose]

You’ll’ve never seen so many blind eyes turned. [ Dry, Metzger drags his heel down off the seat next to him to lean forward for Seoraj’s (empty) beer. He doesn’t gesture for Cage’s cup until he’s on his feet, low enough to the earth’s core that any sway in his center of gravity is easily played into a natural shift of his weight, for those who don’t know what to look for. ]

It’s not up to Gwisin.

[ ...is grim, grudging, sideways sort of agreement with Allaway. ]

You saw the video.

[ Whether Cage offers his cup across or not, Simon departs for the bar. ]

[onyourfeet]

[ Empty cup is handed over with a nod, hooking heels against the bars beneath the table, chair creaking back on its back legs. ]

Doesn't mean he won't be a pain in the ass, but I'll grant you [ and that you encompasses Seoraj, with Metzger halfway to the bar ] not our biggest worry.

Coulda been us.

[ Going out on direct order from the Council? Hell, they just got back from doing just that. ]

[ironwork]

( if they still had their cups, seoraj might've clinked his against cage's to that; the sentiment remains in the way he slouches lower in his seat, exhales deep, the memory of finding the bodies blurred over the blankets of hand-sewn flowers and stoic children who will grow up without mothers, without fathers.

it could've been them. it could be them, one of these days, someone somberly informing their loved ones and their deaths becoming, what? a symbol? a point to make in an argument about politics? cage and metzger know him well enough not to be fooled by the occasional pretense that he isn't bright or observant enough to have that conversation, which is a good thing, except when he wishes he wasn't bright or observant enough to be having this conversation. )

Not this time, ( he says, philosophically. ) You worried about our marching orders?

[onyourfeet]

Strongly considering if we ought to be.

[ His tone is mild, his worry as to marching orders lacking edge; more observational of what other crews might be thinking. Cage trusts Metzger's judgement inasmuch as the Nidhoggr is where he has chosen to throw his weight, what relatively little of it there is to throw after only three years unplugged.

That, or he's always this unsettlingly disconnected to the prospect of mortality. ]

And I think that the abstract, unifying goal in maintaining the defense of the city isn't going to hold forever if the powers that be have different ideas as to what the hell that looks like anymore.

[ironwork]

( seoraj has been a part of the zion defense grid since he was eighteen years old - twenty-four long years he's worked for that unified goal, and all of the people that it represents to him. he misses how straightforward it felt from the center of an armored personal unit, sometimes; he prefers, for the most part, the dynamic he finds working as a part of a hovercraft crew. he's seen enough, done enough, to have these preferences and experience and the unsettling sensation of the ground becoming a bit less stable and certain under his feet.

he likes the abstract unification of humanity. it's an easy thing to like, and he was raised to value pulling together, doing your part; his aversion to irkallans, to the unplugged who can't let go of pasts that didn't exist, is something his parents perhaps unfairly instilled in him considering that his accent is the product of their own difficulty in fully accepting new realities.

he isn't really a simple man. he does, occasionally, wish he lived in as simple a world as it pretends to be. human vs machine. (but not these machines, we made these ones, those machines, the other ones.) human vs human vs fuckery is a headache he does not aspire to, which is why he's been serving for twenty-four years and shown no interest in climbing the ranks; the glance that follows metzger to the bar is a grimace of absent-minded sympathy. )

We get safer, world gets bigger-- people get thoughtful, that it?

( in essence. )

[hellbrokeloose]

[ Metzger’s showing his age in these last few years: he’s more silver and iron than blonde these days, often lapsing into grim introspection when he thinks no one is looking. Tension works taut in the trap of his jaw while he waits at the bar, brow hooded low down at the galvanized grain until he realizes there’s a bowl of flatbread chips next to his wrist. His entire attitude sublimates into ‘hey snacks!’

The effect was telling while it lasted.

A moment later, he returns to thump down a fresh round, grace limited more by his not giving a shit than it is by the length of his arms or his BAC. Cave beer. ]

Thoughtful about what?

[ He retakes his seat with loose-limbed precision, nearly a flourish. ]