Posted by Captain Rende Asam (Commanding Officer) in Main Sim: THE MAW OF CHRONOS - Prologue

Posted by Lieutenant Xam Ra’Ti (Tactical Officer) in Main Sim: THE MAW OF CHRONOS - Prologue

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek (Communications Officer) in Main Sim: THE MAW OF CHRONOS - Prologue
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻
OOC: So, why wait when we can just leap head first into the great unknown? This thread is just the prologue. Please, no in-character responses. I will start a Main Sim thread on the bridge very soon.

I am pleased to give you…

THE MAW OF CHRONOS.

Enjoy!

IC: Prologue - “The Listening Child”

Orris Station – Deep within the Sagan’s Veil Nebula

The station hung like a polished obsidian eye in the heart of the nebula, its smooth lattice structure pulsing faintly against the storm of ionized gases that curled and screamed around it. Named Orris Station after the mineral-rich world that once orbited the now-dead star at the nebula’s center, it was a marvel of deep-space engineering—more observatory than outpost, a gleaming crucible of science suspended in an ocean of interference and ion fire.

Outside, the nebula twisted and coiled with colors beyond natural spectra: purples so deep they approached black, lightless oranges that throbbed like infected wounds, and flashes of something blue-white and clean that came without rhythm. The deeper the station drifted into the Veil, the less natural the light became.

And the less time seemed to matter.

Orris had been tasked with monitoring the gravitational anomalies at the nebula’s core—subspace fractures, they’d believed, or the remnants of a collapsed stellar object. But what they had found instead were distortions that didn’t behave like any astrophysical phenomenon on record. Their waveforms shifted without cause. Their durations stretched and snapped back. The latest readings suggested these weren’t ripples moving through time—they were layers.

Time itself was folding. Responding.

Maybe even watching.

And still they stayed, compelled by curiosity, pride, and something else. Something they would not name.

---

In the command gallery, Director Cora Nivex stood in the dim glow of the primary interface. A thousand data points flowed across a broad holo-display like a river of luminous glyphs. Nivex had spent the last thirty-eight hours upright, sustained only by stimulants, adrenaline, and a sense of duty that had long since calcified into ritual.

Her uniform jacket hung open, her silver-gray undershirt clinging to her frame, damp with recycled air and tension. Her eyes, pale and sharp, never stopped scanning.

“We’re losing the harmonic anchor again,” muttered Lead Technician Varr from the console behind her. His tendrils, braided tight in concentration, twitched as he read the temporal lattice telemetry. “Seventeen-point variance in the last twelve hours.”

Nivex exhaled through her nose. “That’s within threshold.”

“It was,” Varr said, turning in his chair. “But this isn’t drift. The pattern’s… shifting in advance. It’s anticipating the countermeasures. Like it knows.”

Nivex finally turned to look at him. The ridged skin above Varr’s brow was glistening, his braids pulled back so tightly they looked sculpted. She said nothing.

“I’m not being poetic, Cora,” he added, dropping the usual formality. “I ran a quantum correlation model through the emitter logs. The distortions spike every time we prepare a stabilization sequence—before we initiate.”

Nivex looked past him, to the curved viewport that dominated the chamber. The nebula glowed, silent and infinite.

“Do it again,” she said. “Refine the model.”

Varr hesitated. “And if it confirms?”

Nivex didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

---

Elsewhere, in the habitation ring, a young girl walked the corridors barefoot.

Sephi moved like a shadow—quiet, unhurried, and half-present. Her small feet made no sound against the station’s composite flooring, and her dark eyes flicked from one bulkhead to the next, as though searching for something just outside of sight.

At nine rotations, she was tall for her age, slight in build, with a sheet of obsidian-black hair tied back in a loose braid. The soft shimmer of sleep still clung to her skin, but her mind was clear. She hadn’t been able to sleep for days—not truly. There was something wrong here. Wrong in a way no one else seemed to feel.

Her people had a word for the state she was in—mir’en—a kind of sensory openness that occurred in children before their gifts dulled with age. All children were born with minds like still water: reflective, bottomless, and frighteningly clear. But puberty changed that. Logic, hormones, language—they muddied the pool.

Adults forgot how to listen.

Sephi hadn’t.

And the station was not quiet.

She moved down a side corridor lined with sealed observation rooms. Her fingers trailed along the wall, the soft pulse of hidden conduits making the skin of her hand tingle. The surface was dry, but it felt swelled, as if the wall had recently taken a deep breath and held it in.

She stopped near a maintenance hatch and placed her palm flat against the surface.

It was warm.

It shouldn’t be warm.

A voice—not hers—rose in her skull. Deep. Alien. Hungry.

She screamed.

---

The door to the command gallery parted with a hydraulic hiss.

Teacher Hilen entered, guiding Sephi gently by the shoulders. His robes, customary for those of the educator caste, were singed at the edges from a recent conduit malfunction—though his face, always composed, betrayed no sign of stress.

“She’s been… inconsolable,” he said softly. “I thought it best to bring her to you.”

Nivex blinked, dragged back from a wall of data that made less and less sense with each passing moment. Her eyes went first to Hilen, then dropped to her daughter. Her expression softened by degrees—authority cracking under something older, deeper.

“Sephi?” she said, crouching down to the child’s level. “You’re supposed to be in your room.”

Sephi stepped forward and pressed her forehead to her mother’s shoulder. Nivex embraced her instinctively, then held her at arm’s length, reading her expression.

“I didn’t want to wake anyone,” Sephi murmured. “But I couldn’t stay there. There’s something here and it’s getting louder.”

“Louder how?” Nivex asked. “The hum?”

Sephi shook her head. “It’s not the station. It’s something else.”

Nivex exchanged a glance with Hilen. “Yes, the field’s behaving strangely. But we’re handling it.”

Sephi shook her head violently. “No. It’s here. In the walls. It’s pretending.”

“Pretending?” Nivex asked, placing a comforting hand on the side of her daughter’s face. “Pretending to be what?”

Before Sephi could respond, Varr shouted: “Anchor destabilization! Forty-three percent—dropping fast!”

Nivex stood, grabbing Sephi instinctively and pulling her in.

The harmonic lattice, once stable, had begun to oscillate with violent rhythm—thrumming through every deck like a heartbeat. The station lurched. Alarms blared—first one, then a cascading chain of alerts across every quadrant. Lighting shifted to crimson emergency mode as a deep thrumming overtook the background hum of the station’s systems.

“Emergency decouple the harmonics!” Nivex barked, lifting Sephi into her arms. “Shut it down now!”

“No response from the lattice array!” Varr’s voice cracked. “We’re not in control—something’s overriding—something’s inside the system!”

A sound unlike anything living or mechanical rolled through the structure.

Not a noise, exactly. More like a pressure—a groaning, metallic pressure that pressed against the chest and echoed behind the eyes. A resonance deep in the spine. Several crew clutched their heads. One began to scream.

A console exploded.

On the upper walkway, a technician vomited blood, staggering toward the railing before his body split open at the midsection. His spine twisted sideways with a series of sick pops before sloughing over the edge and landing in a wet, boneless heap below.

Panels burst from the walls. Streams of plasma hissed from gaping conduits. A console exploded in front of Varr, the impact tearing half his face from his skull and flinging the rest of him backward like a doll flung by a tantrum.

A junior officer was flung backward into the wall, skull cracking audibly against the bulkhead. Sparks burst from the ceiling. A maintenance tube ruptured, sending a column of boiling vapor across the upper deck. A technician within it screamed—then went silent.

Nivex spun to shield Sephi just as a wave of heat washed over the gallery. She could smell ozone. And something else.

Burnt copper. Meat.

Near the engineering console, a crewman had become trapped in a temporal shear. He stood half-submerged in the floor, looped in the act of crying out—mouth open, face rippling through phases of aging and youth every few seconds. One moment his hair was grey. The next, gone entirely. Then long and dark. Then none at all. Then blood, leaking from every pore.

A junior researcher stumbled as the floor warped beneath her feet. She opened her mouth to cry out, but her jaw locked open, dislocating with a sharp crack before folding backward into her throat. Her body collapsed in a wet heap, convulsing in reverse time—skin tightening into youth, organs shrinking, bones retracting as if unwilling to have ever formed.

In the reactor chamber, a technician was pulled into a localized gravity well no larger than a coin. His spine bent first, then snapped, curling his torso into a perfect arc before the rest of his body folded in on itself like soft cloth, vanishing in a bloom of bloodless mist.

Screams echoed through the central shaft.

A young researcher near the entry convulsed, dropping to the floor and clawing at her skin as her body rapidly cycled through metabolic collapse—muscles wasting, rebuilding, unraveling again as if caught in a loop of cellular birth and decay. Her face melted to bone in seconds, only to reform with a stranger’s eyes. She died three times in ten seconds.

Another crewmember appeared to blink out of phase, each pulse of light sending his limbs jerking to a different location—until his shoulder embedded in a bulkhead, and the rest of his body followed, folding like cloth.

Through it all, Sephi did not cry. Unmoving, she watched it unfold from her mother’s arms as if from a great distance, her small hands clenched in her mother’s uniform.
And then, when the screams began to echo from deeper within the station—when the lights began to flicker in rhythm with something that didn’t belong—Sephi looked up into her mother’s face.

Her voice was almost inaudible beneath the alarms.

“Hungry.”

-OZ

OOC: Feel free to comment OOC though. (I’m needy.) And I untagged everyone so you shouldn’t get a million tags for one post.

-Harley

OOC nice intro… cant wait..this should be fun..

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

And Harley is back!

Ra’Ti, Chief Tactical Officer

I have chills. I am a wuss when it comes to horror. AH! Hahaha

Cpt. Asam, CO

I’m traumatized! Well done, Harley! We’re going into that??!!? Lol

Ensign Chandel Sci