redmarsshit | redshift: tdm #5

redshift: tdm #5

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

▶ Click here to read what characters will experience when arriving in Anchor.

▶ All TDM threads can be considered game canon, and current players are welcome to either top-level on the TDM so prospective players can tag them, or use the prompts for logs or network posts on the communities. All threads on the TDM can be used for Activity Check.

a. don't be a sap.

Good morning, October 25th! Whether you're a confused new arrival or a current resident, you probably had some plans for today, right? Grab breakfast, visit a friend, pick some fruit, explore a new part of the massive city.

Well. Too bad. Because, as every single bot in the city will be telling you the moment you show your face, it's GOOP FESTIVAL DAY! What? You've never heard of it? Preposterous, everyone knows about the Goop Festival, it's one of the most anticipated holidays in Anchor! Haven't you been preparing for this for a week now?

The Goop Festival is a harvest celebration, in particular, a celebration of the sap-producing trees that grow wild in the Park, thick around the edges of the south side of the lake. The bots have been hard at work setting up the festival grounds in the shade of the trees in the balmy fall temperatures. There are spiles tapped into trees with buckets placed underneath that are already half-full of a thick, viscous, amber-colored sap. The bots have also set up troughs of shaved ice with long sticks nearby, with which they will demonstrate for excited residents (you are excited, right?) how to cool the sap in the ice and wrap it around the stick to make it a sort of taffy candy. That's not the only sweet surprise waiting, either.

A long table set up in the grass is loaded down with all sorts of delicious sap-related goodies, ranging from cupcakes with thick globs of sap-flavored frosting to sap-flavored jerky to sap sugar candies, and just about anything else you can imagine. There are a wide variety of offerings that would taste good coated, flavored, or glazed with the sap, which tastes sort of like a caramelized toffee. Another table is laid out that has row upon row of cups, each half-full of the sap, heated lightly to a thinner consistency and served similarly to hot chocolate - at least, if hot chocolate gave you a floaty, happy, hazy sort of feeling. Everything made with this sap does, actually, with the cups of pure sap having a stronger effect and items with less sap content having barely any effect at all.

Does this not sound like your cup of weird tree sap? Too bad. This is the GOOP FESTIVAL, and everything is shut down for this lovely paid vacation day. Spa? Locked down. Kitchens? Locked. Bar? Nope, totally shut down and the server bots are all down at the park. VR Gaming? Too bad, the computers are all shut down. Even roaming the halls and trying to stay out of the way won't help much...be prepared to be dragged down to the park to participate in this mandatory festival! Isn't it exciting?

b. familiar ground.

Every year in Anchor near the end of October, there's a very strange interaction between the protective dome over the city and seasonal radiation surges that happen in the wastelands. Some complicated combination of refraction and reflection means that for the last few days of the month, residents will experience some of the more benign effects of the red shift inside the city.

Did we say benign? Because while there may not be any dangerous radiation to melt your skin off, there are some mind-bending dangers. Characters experiencing the shift will find the world becomes distorted, warped, impossible to navigate; they are enveloped in auditory and visual hallucinations, and can become so disoriented that they can't even recognize people they've known for years. And characters will find that the citywide shift brings in slivers of other universes, little slices of places characters have never seen before...or places so familiar they make the heart beat hard with joy or fear.

And just like in the wastelands, the things that show up in these shifts are all too real. Characters may find themselves walking through a door into a scene straight from home, or from someone else's home. Whether it's a favorite place to share with a new friend, or the nightmare landscape you almost died in, complete with the monster that almost killed you, be careful. Everything you experience here is real, and if you die in the shift, you die for real.

Of course, the city has its own safety measures in place - residents experiencing the hallucinations and appearances of items and places from other worlds may find themselves locked down in the room they're in, trapped with the otherworldly effects of the shift.

c. the virus.

A few weeks ago, people in Anchor started getting a case of the sniffles. While some of the earliest cases might be clearing up, there are still a few people suffering, or people freshly infected by those who were sick earlier, including some of the new arrivals who may not even be feeling it yet.

Which may make the cause of some unexpected 'glitches' around the city a little unclear. Residents who are feeling the effects of the illness, or who are infected but not showing symptoms yet (or anymore) will find that their access to certain parts of the city are restricted. Suddenly, automatic doors aren't opening for them, as if they were ghosts, particularly when they try to access anything that may facilitate transmission of the virus. Suddenly, only some of the residents of the city will find they can't get into half of the MedBay, or the spa, the kitchens, the VR or games rooms, the bar...anywhere people gather or eat or sit close together.

Residents may put together that it's related to the illness some of them have been experiencing over the past few weeks, but it might take a while, since these safety and security measures are affecting people who are showing no symptoms yet. Be prepared for a few days of paranoia while seemingly perfectly healthy people are locked out of common areas. What does the computer know that residents don't? Are these people security risks? Is it a system glitch? What could be going on?

c. the network.

Need to get hold of someone, call for help, ask the city at large a question? Need to warn a friend not to leave their apartment unless they want to be forcibly press-ganged into the Goop Festival? Maybe you need to hold your sat phone up to whatever crazy thing you're seeing and send out a recording to double-check if your eyes are deceiving you and what you're looking at is real?

Whatever the reason, the network is going strong, so feel free to include a post to it in your top-levels.

Mod Note: The "familiar ground" prompt will be active between October 29th and October 31st; "the virus" prompt will be active until the next introductory mingle, which will be kicking off the second part of the illness plot.

Navigation.

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At some point, right around when that animal skull situates itself atop the writhing, horrible, giant, scrumbled-together monstrosity made of mangled bits from the guys he'd torn apart, Ben's attitude shifts. A point of absurdity has been reached, and his horror ticks over into almost-amused outrage. Everything is going so badly that it's comical, and also, he is very, very angry.

"Aww, you gotta be fucking kidding me with this -"

He helps Kieran to sit on the ground; he needs to put a little distance between them if he's going to take out this final-form monster bullshit, but he doesn't trust Kieran's legs to hold him. Princess Thug is there, at least, sticking by the injured man's side. As Ben gets him settled he says:

"He's - doing some weird shit. Just stay here, okay, Kieran? Please. I need you to stay here, and don't move, and don't panic, and I'll fix this."

Apparently he has to fix it because this healer that Pratt called? KIND OF BUSTED. Sure, Kieran's eyes are back and the bleeding has stopped, and that's great. But Ben's ears are ringing with Kieran's agonized cries about still not being able to see, and clearly whatever magic Carlisle had used to get him this far is some bad fucking business. Ben's not really sure if Carlisle's extended hand is him trying to stop this huge Frankenzombie from forming - in which case he's doing a bad job of it - or whether he's gone completely dark side and he is summoning it intentionally. That's a bridge he'll have to cross in a few minutes.

Either way, this is a mess and he's going to have to clean it up by himself, before he gets Kieran to the med bay, where maybe he ought to have just taken him in the first place.

"Pratt, stand back-!"

It's all the warning he has time to give. Ben is still aching from using his powers earlier, but it's so easy to open the portal when he is this full of adrenaline, this angry. He runs a few paces to the side, so that he can draw the monster away from the cluster of people - Kieran and Pratt and Carlisle alike. Ben bellows as he opens the portal, and this time, the shrieks of the creatures on the other side are particularly loud and wrenching and monstrous.

The tentacles are less frenzied in their attack, this time. This beast is bigger than those men were, and it requires more concentration from Ben to grapple with it. But those tentacles are sinewy and almost impossibly strong. After some struggling, one of them whips down low, unbalancing the huge bone creature, and once it is on the ground, the tentacles begin to pulverize at it.

But evidently, things aren't going to go that easily. Because no sooner has Ben beaten the everloving shit out of it than the thing is re-forming in an entirely different shape, this one much more lopsided, lower to the ground. Harder to knock over. It's a clever move, but Ben fights through the pain and this time, the tentacles are twisting, looping around the middle of the creature and wringing it like a wet rag.

It goes on like this - Ben attacking, the creature reforming. But at least there is some progress - many of the bones are pulverized enough that they are not useful in the reconstructions, and so it is getting smaller and smaller with each reformation. Which is good, because Ben can feel himself tiring, a trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck. The pain in his core has been building and building, and he doesn't know how much longer he can keep this up. He feels woozy, nauseous. But Kieran is back there, and Pratt, and even that mage guy doesn't deserve to die probably. He has to keep this up. Has to protect them.

It all boils down to one thing: Kieran is too tired to do anything other than listen. Panic only lasts for so long, and the sudden bursts of adrenaline that once coursed through his veins have ebbed away, leaving him drained of nearly all of his energy. He blinks, a futile action with nothing working to protect, but he's grateful that he can do it anyway. At least the grisly wounds have closed even if the dried blood caked on his skin feels like a stiff mask.

He takes solace in the feeling of fur underneath his palm and mindlessly starts petting at Princess Thug. He's not useful for much else like this. Eventually, he takes it upon himself to close his eyes and keep them that way to protect his eyes, such as they are. It's tempting to fall asleep, but his basic instincts are telling him that would be the worst idea, so he fights the urge.

The wolf helpfully sets her head in Kieran's lap, wanting to get all the skritches she can. The horrifying death monster would get a growl out of her if it got any closer but apparently Ben has that covered.

Meanwhile Pratt is rooted to the spot, everything in him yelling that he should run away from all of this. He's a traitor and a coward and..

No.

No.

Things are different here. Just like they were in Hadriel. He has people he cares about and who care about him (he hopes), and he's not going to just abandon them.

He doesn't know what's going on, maybe this is a sideeffect of Carlisle's healing magic, too much healing and something necrotic rises from the grave? In a way that seems to fit with what he knows, nothing comes without a price. The ink, the rot, this horrible monster zombie thing, maybe that was just the price of using too much healing too fast. He'd ask later, he didn't have time now.

Tentacles shoot out and rip and tear and the monster continues to reform despite Ben's best efforts. He doesn't want to get in there and start attacking it because he'd hit the tentacles and he's not sure if they're connected to Ben in some way where that would injure him as well.

"Carlisle! Carlisle listen, you gotta make this thing stop." He darts in, grabbing the back of Carlisle's cowl and dragging him further away. He only gets a few feet before he has to drop him, his hand cracked and bleeding from being that close to him. He holds it against his chest, not wanting to look and see muscles exposed or worse, bone. He kneels down trying to meet Carlisle's eyes, "You gotta calm down. Everything is okay, Kieran is stabilized and we can get him to the Medbay. Ben is... taking care of this. But you gotta stop whatever's going on. Okay? You still with me?"

Carlisle is still with Pratt, but barely, having curled into a ball the second the deputy released him. Amongst the sounds of tentacles cracking animated bones, the fragments of said bones reforming into multiple, more twisted aberrations, the excruciating throbbing like a hammer pounding at his temples, and his utter desperation to shut everything out so he can regain his composure, Carlisle barely hears Pratt's voice, much less understands it. It doesn't even register that he's been dragged a short distance, his gloved palms pressed into his eyes as though they'd stifle his agony, his glasses shoved to his forehead in the process. And there's so much screaming -- who is that screaming and why won't they stop?

Oh, oh that's him. That's him screaming, or rather attempting to. What rattles through his throat is not much more than a guttural howl, one mostly lost between the calamity around them and the ink bubbling in his airway. The largest of the now numerous abominations, sensing its master is in danger, is drawn to him -- and to Pratt, the man it assumes is a threat. It barrels toward them both, its misshapen head lowered as it charges like a furious bull, its tattered flesh and malformed musculature doing little to hinder its speed.

He can't do this, Carlisle tells himself, feeling the ground shake. He can't do this right now. He's not the Blight Heir -- he has to stop. It's too much. It's too much it's too much it's too much why won't it stop he doesn't want this stop stop stop stop STOP—

And everything does. The charging aberration comes to a sudden halt mid-stride, its entire frame crashing to the ground, skidding to a point mere steps away from Carlisle and Pratt; the smaller ones, mostly made of stretched skin and shattered bones at this point, freeze in their assault of the tentacles and the man wielding them. Though wildly unfocused, Carlisle's compulsion gives him dominance over the undead -- and it is likely to be felt by the living around him, too.

Edited 2019-11-12 10:47 (UTC)

Ben watches as the largest of the monsters lurches away from him, out of his reach - but he's too exhausted and in too much pain to catch up with it quick enough. He can't go on like this. He's down to the last of his strength and he knows it.

But just as he's watching in horror, waiting for the aberration to plow into Pratt and the healer, it stops and then crashes and burns. That isn't all - the other monsters stop, too. And, most importantly, Ben stops. He doesn't choose to. It's like something has clamped down on him. Something external.

It's a familiar feeling, but he can't place it. Not yet.

He is frozen for just a moment or two, but then the realization hits him that this might be the opportunity he needs. With enormous effort, he wrenches free from that compulsion to stay still and slams the last of those smaller monsters into the ground, smashes them to bits with the tentacles and then, with a hitched breath that's almost a sob of relief, closes the portal and sinks to his knees. And finally, finally, this time they do not re-form.

Hoarse and breathing hard, Ben calls out:

"Everybody still alive?"

Ben hasn't even noticed yet that Pratt is hurt, too, that he'd gotten hurt just getting near to Carlisle. He is just trying to wrench some semblance of control in this situation. In a moment, he'll stand up and start helping everyone to the medbay. In just a moment. He just needs to rest a few seconds.

Edited 2019-11-12 18:29 (UTC)

Each slam and crunch and shout and crash serves as reminders to the unbridled chaos that never seems to stop erupting--until it does.

Kieran isn't sure how to respond to Ben's call. Is he alive? In the most basic sense of the word, yes. Does he want to be alive right now? No comment. It's tough to articulate even an iota of what he's feeling, especially since he's far too tired to try and discern those emotions for himself, let alone for anybody else.

So he settles for a defeated grunt, still gently petting at Princess Thug, counting on the texture of soft fur to keep him from completely shutting down.

But hey, it can only get better from here, right?

Everything is chaos, there's so much screaming and even worse is the incredibly unsettling squish of tentacles meeting a creature that's mostly gooshy muscles and sinews. It doesn't seem like Carlisle is listening to him, or even that he knows that Pratt is there, with his hands pressed into his eyes there's not a lot that Pratt can do to force him to react short of grabbing him and shaking him.

And Pratt isn't eager to injure his other hand as well.

While he's frozen with indecision for how to fix this mess of a situation, everything else freezes too. The creature stops moving, the tentacles aren't bashing anything and there's an eerie quiet where all Pratt can hear is Kieran's breathing and...

Breathing.

That's a thing that Pratt had been doing just fine without any conscious effort but suddenly he realizes he isn't anymore. There's the brief bubbling up of panic before it passes and Pratt falls to the side gasping for air.

"What the fuck?" Which is as close to an answer as Ben is going to get right now.

The largest of the aberrations collapses, its structure caving in on itself as the magic that kept it animated dissipates from its twisted frame. The glow fades from its eyes, traces of lingering energy rising from the hollow sockets in wispy trails -- and as Carlisle finally composes himself and removes his hands from his face, there are similar vapors rising from his eyes, as well. He doesn't hear Ben's question through the ache in his head, but he couldn't have claimed to be alive even if he had; he somewhat hears Pratt's reply, but does not know what the fuck is happening, himself. For now, he's just trying to regain his control over his energies.

With a deep breath -- one of many -- he attempts to pick himself off the ground, his limbs shaking. One of his arms trembles, jerking violently as he gets to his feet; he cradles it with a hiss, his gaze going from Ben to Kieran, then to the abomination, and then to Pratt gasping on the ground. One man may be the person he was called to heal, and the other may be the one who dealt with the calamity he caused, but Pratt is his friend, and therefore, he's the one Carlisle beelines for first, trying to ensure his health above everyone else's.

"D- Deputy?" his voice rattles in the stillness, his legs unsteady as he takes a step to close the gap between them.

It is only then that Ben notices the way the Deputy is holding his hand close to his chest. For a moment, he's confused. He hadn't seen any of those creatures getting close enough to land a blow. Had Pratt been hurt before, by the men that attacked Kieran, and Ben just hadn't noticed? No, no he hadn't. Ben had watched his hands as he'd texted Carlisle to come. They'd been fine then. But now, he sees blood, and he gets to his feet, legs shaking under the effort of supporting him as he stumbles over.

He isn't the only one, either. Carlisle is moving towards him, too, looking just as unsteady as Ben feels. When he's close enough to see the way Pratt's skin is cracked, he feels a surge of nausea, but he manages to swallow back that feeling. He's definitely going to throw up, and soon, but hopefully he can keep it together until he gets a chance to do so somewhere in private once everyone is safe.

"What happened?"

Ben looks, too, at that healer, who at least seems to be freaking out less, now. There's still all that dark stuff - ink? - staining him like blood but he doesn't seem like he's immediately going to keel over from any injuries. Ben doesn't even want to know how he must look - there's definitely a certain amount of inevitable blood spatter, but at least he's not completely covered in the stuff for once.

"We need to get you both to the medbay. And Kieran. Can you walk?"

He doesn't quite realize how much he looks like a stiff breeze might knock him over, too; right now, Ben's all about ignoring his own needs and keeping everyone else safe.

Pratt's brilliant plan to pretend nothing had happened to his hand isn't really working. He'd almost thought that if he didn't look at it, it wouldn't be real. But that sort of dissonance only works for emotions that he wants to bury and not the very real feeling of his hand cracking, bleeding and parts of his skin rotting away.

Still, he doesn't really want to look at it.

"I think everyone's okay. Or well.. we will be." He looks up at Carlisle, there's so much ink streaming from him and that seems bad. What if that goop is what keeps him alive? Is that his blood? Pratt doesn't really know.

"But Kieran's stabilized, we can get him down to the medbay." He glances over at Kieran who's still laying on the ground next to the wolf. "Might need to carry him, but.."

By which he means Ben and him might need to, and with one working arm... He finally looks down at his hand, flexing his fingers and wincing. Everything seems to be working, but it looks horrible and he can feel bile rising in his throat.

He keeps it down but he is very much going to be puking later.

Pratt might not want to look at his hand, but Carlisle certainly does, and the moment he sees the raw, bleeding, peeling flesh, he stops, utterly frozen with indecision. He can't get near, he tells himself. But it should be fine now, shouldn't it? The aberration is no more, and while riled, he can feel he's in control of his energies—

No, he cannot risk it. He can't risk anything right now. Look what he did. Look what he's done. And worst of all, he did it to someone who trusted him, who should be his friend.

But he wasn't like this in that other world. He was alive. He wasn't yet a monster, a creature, the Blight Heir.

Carlisle tries to force his guilt aside, his entire frame shaking as he struggles to convince himself to do something, anything; he remains petrified, much like a child surrounded by delicate trinkets, warned to be careful so as not to break them. He has to help take them somewhere, to get help -- he can't stay here. He can't—

"Wh- what should I do?" he asks quietly, his voice grating as it escapes him, his eyes locked on Pratt, on his hand.

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redshift: tdm #5

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