redshift: tdm #5

[modblob]

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.

Comments

[livingdeadgirl]

Ami lets out a little sigh of relief and smiles. He took that better than she thought he would! And his joke is pretty funny. Ami is a great audience for morbid humor.

"Haha! Which one's Sigrun?"

She could probably figure it out by process of elimination, but.

[braidmage]

Reynir gestures over to Sigrun, and almost as if on queue, the version of her from this memory bellows out another one of those distinctive laughs and slaps somebody standing near her - nobody Reynir recognizes, though maybe Ami will - on the shoulder. Clearly, way too hard, since their drink sloshes a little onto the floor.

Gods he misses Sigrun. She was so mean and badass and wonderful.

"Does that mean that you had a whole life and died and were brought back in this world, too?"

Hey, he's not a total idiot, after all! He at least has gotten that that is the rule for how people ended up in this place. If it was true for Tuuri and Lalli and Emil and Sigrun, wouldn't it be true for Ami as well?

[livingdeadgirl]

(Ami does; it's Muhammed from JoJo! Only he thinks his Stand is a Persona, due to shenanigans. Nothing about that is relevant here.)

"Yeah," Ami says, nodding. That was a correct inference, well done, Reynir. "I don't remember everything about my past life yet. Just bits and pieces, really. It's kind of a gradual process, once you've awakened. First you start remembering, in visions, a little at a time. Then you start receiving things like... items your past self used to own, or abilities they used to have. And eventually..."

Her horns are back. When did those show up again?

"You start to look like them, if you didn't already."

[braidmage]

"Oh..."

He turns to look at Tuuri once again. How much did she remember? He hopes, even if it's a little silly, that she only remembers the good things. The fun they'd had exploring, and her family being happy when she was little, and her friends and the things that gave her joy. Not the kade laying waste to her village. Not that horrible scene in the vehicle cornered by that troll. Not realizing she was infected and making the terrible decision she did. She deserves all the best parts of her life, and nothing else.

Even if it's just a silly wish... he hopes, nonetheless.

Then Reynir turns his eyes to Ami once more and asks:

"So... your past self had horns, and the eyes, and that's what has been happening to you?"

Not a corruption or an encroaching illness, but a return to something she'd been before. Discovering new parts of herself that aren't new at all, but were just hidden. Though obviously, it still must be terrifying, not to have control of her own body like that...

[livingdeadgirl]

It is pretty frightening. She knows what trolls look like, but she's remembered absolutely nothing about their biology. Are they mammals? Bugs? Can they eat the same food as humans? How do they go to the bathroom? How do they reprodu- y'know what let's not worry about that one ever actually. Human puberty is bad enough, it's going to suck if she has to go through alien puberty too.

But it's not quite the existential crisis it was before she spoke to Cole about it. Aradia's rebirth doesn't mean Ami's death. She'll be transformed, but not subsumed. It'll be weird and scary, but it's not an illness, and it won't kill her.

Ami nods to his question. "Yeah. Well, sort of. It's only been happening in this dream space, or whatever it is. Outside of it, I'm still biologically human for now. But it's also going to happen in real life, eventually."

She gazes off into the middle distance, and the scene changes - or half of it, anyway. Tuuri and the club are still there on Reynir's side of the line, but on Ami's side it gives way to open space, the rolling green hills and night sky of the trollplanet. Just above the horizon hang the planet's two moons, one neon green, the other bright magenta. And not too far away stands a grey house topped with a windmill. Aradia's hive.

"... Her name was Aradia," Ami says. "She was an alien, a being from another planet. That her species happens to be called 'trolls' is just an unhappy coincidence."

After a moment, she looks up at Reynir again. "I can show you what she looked like, if you want."

[braidmage]

All of that makes sense to Reynir, according to the logic through which he sees the world. The transformations she's going through in this dream space are a kind of omen, for what will happen to her eventually in the waking world. Hopefully, they will give her time to prepare and plan, for when these changes hit.

He watches in silence as the scene changes again to a world that is more foreign that any he has seen before. Are those... moons? But they are so brightly colored... he doesn't understand how. The architecture is strange, too. But Ami doesn't seem shocked by it, so he just stares in silence. There's only so much he can be shocked by in a single day; at some point he is just going along with it.

"So it's just the same name, and no other similarities? That's a relief..."

At Ami's offer to show him what Aradia looked like, Reynir feels a momentary flicker of fear, one that he dismisses quickly. He has met aliens before, and already seen part of that change on Ami. It's nothing to be afraid of. And he should know, now, so that when this starts happening to Ami in the Anchor, he can help support her.

"Yeah. I would like that."

[livingdeadgirl]

Ami nods. "Okay."

With that, she takes a few unhurried steps out into the grass. It'd be lying to say she isn't a bit nervous about this herself. Even back in Recollé, her friends thought her changes were freaky - in a good way, usually, but still. Luna even said once that grey skin sounded hideous. It's no secret that Ami likes to look nice, but she genuinely cares what other people think of her appearance. Her true friends will still accept her as an alien, she knows that; they like her for what's inside.

But she'd still prefer the outside not to be ugly.

She looks up at the weird moons for a moment, takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and remembers the feeling of waking. Breath in her lungs, blood in her veins, alive -

Ami's outline blurs, and in the blink of an eye, she's different. With her back to Reynir, it almost looks like no more than a costume change. The new outfit is all red, with a pointed hood and long tails... but the most obvious feature is a pair of big, red butterfly wings coming out of her back, which shed gentle sparkles as they flutter involuntarily behind her.

Finally, she turns to face him. Some of what he sees will be familiar from before - the grey skin, the horns, the curlier hair (though most of it's tucked away in her hood). But she still resembles Ami, too, in the structure of her face, the hint of shyness in her smile as she watches for his reaction.

[braidmage]

Even with warning and time to brace himself, Reynir hadn’t been expecting wings. Maybe he should have, considering Ami did tell him that trolls (that is going to take some getting used to) are aliens from another planet. But wings are – so different. But there’s no denying they are really delicate and beautiful, like a giant butterfly. The clothes he barely notices because, well, WINGS.

Then she is turning around, and the rest of the changes are much much smaller than the addition of wings. Reynir’s mind had suddenly jumped to expecting something much more like an insect’s face, three dozen eyes and a snout and who knows what. But Ami still looks like Ami! What changes are there are, really, minimal. A few changes in color, the horns he’d already seen, maybe something different about her hair? But really, that’s all.

The small amount of tension that had built in his shoulders drains away and Reynir smiles.

"Oh! You don’t look that different at all!"

He takes a few small steps closer, taking in the changes. The skin color is a little unusual, but it’s no different than seeing someone in a very strange light, or in an old black and white photograph. The wings are sparkly and how hadn’t he noticed that before?!

Reynir says, with friendly protective indignation:

"Whoever named that species- your species trolls was in a very mean mood that day, or an idiot. Troll means ugly, and you’re not even a little bit ugly!"

[livingdeadgirl]

Ami's smile spreads into a wide grin, and a dark red blush spreads across her cheeks. She wasn't expecting him to run away screaming or anything, at this point, but she didn't expect him to be so earnest, either! Come to think of it, this might be the closest thing she's had yet to a cute guy telling her she's pretty?

In any case, it's a huge relief. Her heart flutters excitedly, and so do her wings - she doesn't even notice that her feet have left the ground.

"Geez, Reynir! You're such a flatterer," she says. Because "not ugly" constitutes flattery now, I guess.

[braidmage]

Reynir can tell that Ami is happy, and relieved. She must have really been dreading this. And he knows his own reactions earlier had doubtless contributed to that dread. He wants to undo that, now.

And - oh, gods, Ami is... flying now, okay! Reynir's eyes go wide, but, honestly, she's got wings, of course, she can hover up off the ground! He just smiles at her, a little closer to his eye-level, now. When she calls him a flatterer he shakes his head, denies it categorically:

"No way! Flattering means it's not totally true, or I've got some ulterior motive, and c'mon. I'm not an ulterior kind of a guy."

More seriously, he adds:

"You're still you. I can tell."

[livingdeadgirl]

No, he's right - she may not have known Reynir long, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who just tells you what you want to hear. She's still herself - recognizably herself. It's not a mutation but a metamorphosis, a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly - kind of literally, even!

Unable to contain herself, Ami bursts out giggling, and suddenly zips forward to hug him again. But it's different from a few minutes ago, in the memory of the tank - this one's warm, enthusiastic, joyful.

"Thanks," she says, in between laughs. "That... you don't know how much that means to me."