jaegeracademy | [ open ] titanic showdown: striker eureka and gypsy danger vs n guruvilu

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[ open ] titanic showdown: striker eureka and gypsy danger vs n guruvilu

Characters: ALL.
Location: LOCCENT & later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn>Cape Horn.
Date/Time: March 7th & 8th.
Summary: The Shatterdome watches and responds to the double-kaiju attack at Cape Horn.
Additional Notes: Please refer back to the OOC post for specific questions!

Andrea called all Cadets into the back of LOCCENT to watch the proceedings of the fight with Nguruvilu. She left their management to Zhang and Contreras, leaving the Cadets standing at ease and on order to keep their voices down and observe.

They'd need to know how to work in this place and with these people, even if they never set foot in a Jaeger.

After the battle was finished, all available personnel was funneled off to assist in the clean-up efforts, alongside organized and local groups of Chileans who managed to get down to the Cape. Both Kaiju have been dragged on land to forestall heavy contamination of marine environments, but some spill over was inevitable. Containment and cleaning efforts would be both on land and by sea, running on quick timelines for those in K-Science who wanted to preserve samples of the Kaiju in time enough to be useful for study later on.

Welcome to the down and dirty side of fighting alien monsters, Cadets. Welcome to the gross and gritty side of your work, Shatterdome Staff.

We thank you for your dedication to humanity.

In order to inspire our new Cadets, here is some clarification and a few prompts for clean up:

1. Kaiju blue is a corrosive and toxic material. It is considered a health and environmental hazard. All PPDC staff and the local government crews that participate in the cleanup will be given protective haz-mat suits and specially designed equipment. No Cadets will be put unnecessarily at risk during the initial 3 months of training. Part of the classroom instruction as per Academy scheduling involves procedures to handle hazards such as this, so the Cadets are theoretically prepared! (They may be psychologically unprepared, etc. but in order to come into contact with kaiju blue it would have to be a player decision, and it would require the character to ignore or misunderstand safety rules that have been stated to them by the many supervising professionals around.)

2. The scene is grim. While the Jaeger teams successfully stopped the kaiju along the coastal shelf and kept the city from suffering damages, there will be many casualties of marine and avian life in the area due to the kaiju blue. These too will be part of the cleanup. If any human remains are found, cadets have been instructed not to touch them but instead to notify the nearest person in authority.

3. In general, the kaiju blue can be treated like an oil spill, but more toxic and corrosive.

Now, the fun stuff! Here are some prompts to get you started, however you are free and welcome to invent your own. Note that while Cadets and Staff members have been assigned to teams for the event, what teams you place them on is entirely up to you, the players. You are free to assign them to more than one duty as different needs arise.

K-science: Your character may be helping to collect samples and specimens. This job comes with extra precautions. Be sure to watch those knives!

Medical: Feel free to pitch in anywhere, but make sure your first responder badge is clearly on display. Medical cases may be referred to you at any time, including if locals are unaware or have foolishly decided to approach. Kaiju blue is toxic not only through physical contact but even through simply being inhaled. Victims will cough up a characteristic blue vapor, and display other common toxicity symptoms for common poisons. All victims should be carefully isolated from the general population and anyone not wearing the proper haz-mat gear.

Land: You may find yourself scrubbing flagstones or tide breakers. You may be helping secure pieces of kaiju carcass for transport -they're huge!- or you may be working crowd control to be sure that locals don't approach. And if locals do approach, you'll be sending them straight to medical. You may encounter dead wildlife.

Sea: Try not to get seasick, it's murder cleaning those haz-mat suits out, and you're under strict instructions not to remove the helmets! Those assigned to ship crews will be helping skim dead marine life from the water right along with the kaiju blue slicks. The boats must be constantly hosed down to avoid corrosion damage. You're in for a choppy, unpleasant ride and a lot of heavy lifting. Marine life can be pretty large.

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Mike had stood in silence, eyes scanning the screens he could see, slightly squinting to see more clearly. He hadn't wanted to get in anyone's way, and his height helped to a degree, but after a point, the screens just weren't constructed to be seen from so far away.

But once they had been downed (the murmuring about a double event was still rampant), Mike had climbed onto the transport down south. He'd bundled himself up, knowing what weather they were facing, and the smells he'd be breathing. His scarf was the best idea he'd had in a while, but it didn't stop the ammonia from being eyewatering the closer he got. "Please tell me there's someplace around here handing out those cleanup bunnysuits."

"Over there." Kou responded helpfully, already zipped into a suit. He gestured toward the response vans and then nodded past where they were standing now, further toward the shoreline. "Our assignment squads are there, on the clipboard."

"Thank God," Mike muttered under his breath, giving Kou a nod as he headed over. He didn't mind helping with the cleanup but he had to get some kind of eyeshield before watering turned into bleeding, he was pretty sure. "Never-fucking-ever going to complain about chopping onions again..."

There hadn't been much time for cheering when the kaiju went down, though they had for a few minutes. They'd quickly been ushered out to transports and to the scene. The ride had been a chaotic blur of instructions and equipment checks and dizzying reminders everywhere of the morning's big event.

They stepped out, unloaded things, suited up, and received their assignments all in such a hurry that there wasn't any time to think it over. Kou, who had no sailing experience whatsoever, found himself nonetheless part of a team dragging the water for kaiju remains. The slick blood spots meant that they weren't searching in vain, but they seemed to be killing far more fish than they were netting bits of spilled kaiju guts. Or maybe the fish were dead before they ever got there. The kaiju blue was dangerous. So dangerous that even their obsessively reinforced nets kept disintegrating if they weren't cleared and neutralized often enough, allowing diseased fish and god knew what else to slide back into the water with a sickening squelch.

Watching it made Kou swallow roughly, and with renewed vigor he helped to run out another net, panicking a little every time he nearly slipped on the slick deck. If he fell over the side, there wasn't much the hazard suit could do to protect him. It was obvious from the grim faces the others were wearing. His hands shook just a little on the net, but he steadied his grip and ran anyway, calling to the person he ran alongside.

"How do we clear the one that isn't in the base yet? Does this release farther away when they pull the sides open?"

"That's the plan at least." Tom looked downright sickly in the eye-burning yellow Hazmat suit. He wasn't the swarthiest of people to begin with but the sight of the insidious blue-tinged tide being washed in left him white as a sheet. Like so many survivors who had lost people to the Kaiju Blue post-Trespasser, the young man had a healthy dose of wariness when it came to the poisonous substance. "Lets hope they did their homework because I'm not looking forward to wading out there into that crap."

"Not another one..."

Another fallen penguin is what Ngaio's crouching down to examine. In the window of her yellow hazmat suit, she looks pale: She's never been so close to a kaiju site, or even to this much dead wildlife; her lifetime's been blessedly free of local beached whales.

She pokes the bird with her tongs and gets no response. "I think this one's dead too," she calls, none of her usual enthusiasm in her voice.

Yaichirou is at the spill site for less than a minute before he decides that now is not the time to think. The destruction is overwhelming. Trying to process it would only slow him down, and he can't afford that when there's so much work to do. He dons his hazmat suit and a backpack sprayer full of neutralizing agent, pale but stony-faced, and narrows his world to one tide breaker or rocky cove at a time. He glances up when Ngaio speaks.

"Let me see."

He kneels down and prods the bird with the spray nozzle. It doesn't move. He's never had to check a bird for signs of life before, but he'd be surprised if anything could survive with that much kaiju blue caked on its feathers. Especially not something so small and so delicate--

Now isn't the time to think, he reminds himself.

"Looks dead to me too." He sighs and stands up, readying the sprayer. "Stand back. We can't dispose of it like this."

Ngaio backs away, still staring at the penguin. At first she thinks she's going to watch, but then she looks at another tidebreaker instead, one already clean of kaiju blue.

"Wish we could give 'em a proper burial instead of just cleaning and disposal," she says, hugging herself as she raises her voice above the sound of the spray. "They deserve it."

They didn't deserve getting covered in kaiju blue, is the underlying point. Not that humans deserve kaiju blue either, but she's very glad she didn't get assigned to crowd control: She probably couldn't handle seeing a person affected by it, couldn't help but imagine someone she knows in their place. She has family members who still work on the sea - kaiju hadn't gone that far south before she left home but this place is further, it could totally happen.

"Don't be ridiculous. The longer the clean-up takes, the further the contamination will spread."

Yaichirou's voice is sharp and he doesn't even look up. He has no patience for idle sentiment even at the best of the times. Of course they didn't deserve this. What they deserve has nothing to do with it. This is what's happened and it's up to them to keep it from happening to more wildlife or, god forbid, to people.

The kaiju blue hisses and bubbles away, revealing open sores underneath. His grip on the trigger falters. Logically he knows that he's not hurting the penguin-- it's already dead-- but he can't help feeling guilty. He turns the sprayer to a lower setting.

"...It's a kind thought though," he concedes.

Edited 2014-03-18 02:50 (UTC)

Ngaio frowns.

"It's not like we're on the edges of the zone," she points out sullenly. "And we could do it after the cleanup."

The lower setting must mean he's close to finishing and she can deal with the body. She allows herself to look again, and makes herself keep looking this time. There will be more dead animals to clean up, and having a cry or throwing up in her hazmat suit would probably not look good on her records when they're looking at moving cadets to their division of choice.

[ Setsuna frowned at the blue-coated birds that peppered the shore with their lifeless carcasses. He remembered a similar scene from the news feed that followed Onibaba's attack, and the memory only served to increase his ire. As did the idea that part of his specialized training involved cleaning up shit like this.

He looked up at the sound of Ngiao's voice. He was still too new to really recognize any of the other cadets that make up the Shatterdome just yet. After all, he just barely finished orientation before the attack occurred. So his tone was somewhat guarded when he called back to her. ]

"Shit. How many does that make now?

"Eighteen," Sara called out lamely.

She was somewhere a few feet behind Setsuna. Even in the bulky hazmat suit, her body language is slightly slumped and obviously unhappy. Like Setsuna, this was the second time she'd seen something like this. The scattered birds and fish that dotted the coast could easily have been the dead and dying cats, dogs, and people who had sprawled out in the streets in the wake of Onibaba's attack when she was nine.

But they didn't have time to dwell on that, did they? The beach would never get cleaned if they stopped to lament over every fallen penguin. But that didn't mean she didn't want to.

She could tell Setsuna was thinking the same things she was. She wanted to reach out with one gloved hand and seek his for support, but she didn't. She took a deep breath. "I guess all we can do is keep going now."

Edited 2014-03-15 19:02 (UTC)

[ He glanced back at her. Of course, this would be even harder on her. When she was younger, Sara used to break into tears at the sight of an injured bird, much less a flock that had been burned and choked to death by Kaiju sludge. And he doubted teasing her about how weird she looked in that hazmat suit would do much right now. Not that he really felt up to teasing.

He pulled out his sprayer and moved toward the nearest set of stained flagstones, as his tone grew more somber. ]

"Yeah. Who knows how long we'll be out here. I'm still trying to get a head count on how many people we have. How well can you move around in that thing?"

At least someone feels the way she does about all of this. Sara comes running towards Ngaio. She's carrying a bad of animals, ready to be disposed of. It's a shame that that's what has to become of them. Like they're nothing but trash.

"It looks like a little one, too," she says. "I don't think it was very old. Barely not a baby." She opens the bag and gets ready for Ngaio to lift the bird's carcass inside.

"I'm ready when you are."

Ngaio's face crumples at that realization. She'd thought this species of penguin was just small, but now she can totally see this one as a baby.

As gingerly as if it were still alive, she grips the penguin in her tongs and lifts it into the bag. Her focus narrows to that one bird rather than look at everything else in the bag - as far as she's concerned, the only reason animals should be in bags is if you're doing the groceries and buying a lot of meat.

"If we can find one that's alive today, I'll be stoked," she says, though her hopes aren't too high. "I'll learn how to knit and make it a sweater. Those penguin sweaters are for after disasters, eh, not just if they're cold?"

"It's facinating," Hanji replies, voice muffled by the mask she wears, "The way it's poison to everything on our planet..."

She shoots a grin at Ngaio, "Makes you wonder why they come here in the first place."

'Fascinating' is not how Ngaio would put it ('terrible', perhaps? she could go for 'terrible'), but this is one of her superiors, so she's not about to talk back. Besides, she'd heard Officer Zoe being weird like this at the K-Science Q&A too; Ngaio's more surprised that she can still think these things face-to-face with the victims of kaiju attacks, however inhuman.

"Colonisation, ma'am?" she ventures, spouting the first second hand opinion that comes to mind, something she'd heard at home and quickly tuned out of. She doesn't wonder why the kaiju come: It's enough for her that they come and destroy things at all.

Because Hilbert's lacking the real determination and all to become a Ranger, he's settled for helping out collect specimens of Kaiju instead. Better to see up close and personal what they're dealing with, he guess... Kaiju Blue is so. Well. Blue! Like wow. He's only seen this blue of stuff in an old lava lamp he used to have.

That broke when he kicked it off his stand.

It wasn't a pleasant night to be Hilbert Lécuyer. Or morning either.

It's really gross doing this, but honestly? Remembering how hyped Miss Hanji had been about these things puts him in a better mood. Expect to hear cheerful whistling and to see the teen trying not to cut himself as he clumsily handles knives. That'd be so bad. Totally awful. A real shame.

Hanji is pretty hyped, all thinys considered. She's everywhere at once, handing out advice and trying to see everything that'a being collected. There's a gleam in her eye that might seem a bit off as she joins Hilbert, peering at him through the protective mask of her hazmat suit, "Amazing, isn't it?"

"Actually, yeah. It is pretty cool. But also kind of weird, to be honest, seeing it like this compared to on TV." Like props versus a real dead thing. Hilbert feels like he's got a day ahead of him, just looking around at everything that needed to be collected, even if there are others helping... All he can think about is how amazing it'd been to watch the Jaegers fight live.

Ahhhh, one day! One day he'll maintain them! That'd be amazing!

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he doesn't notice that particular gleam in Hanji's eyes. But, since she's here... He hopes they haven't covered anything like this in past lessons because that would definitely give him away. "Um, even if the kaiju blue is toxic and all, do you think there could be some kind of practical use for it?"

"Television doesn't compare to the real thing!" Hanji exclaims. She sounds a bit too excited by the prospect, but there you are. She scoops up a handful of the Blue and lets it run through her fingers, a giant grin plastered on her face. Then the question finally registers.

"Practical use...? Well, I suppose. But we're here to study it, not weaponize it! We're getting messy! Making mistakes!"

Oh, so you can scoop it up like that. He'd been wondering about that. He'll just push some around with his fingers with his own growing grin. Miss Hanji's excitement really was contagious!

"I was thinking more of like, something the public could use! Like how a lot of deadly poisons are medicines and stuff like that." Anti-venom from snakes for snake bites, that kind of logic. Hilbert looks around and sighs. "But I guess more people'd probably use it against their enemies, huh... That'd be awful. We didn't have anything like this around New York."

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[ open ] titanic showdown: striker eureka and gypsy danger vs n guruvilu

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Open, during clean up.

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land cleanup

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Re: land cleanup

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Re: land cleanup

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