redmarsshit | august 2020. welcome to the void.

Entry tags:

!test drive

august 2020. welcome to the void.

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. tombstorm.

A few days after the end of July, early in the morning, everyone in Anchor will be able to feel a deep rumbling moving through the city, will hear a rush of rocket fuel, and anyone who goes out to see the source of the sounds and vibrations will be able to watch the alien cruise ship carefully detaching from Anchor's exit, detaching their radiation bubble from Anchor's, making sure to never break the city's dome before flying off into the vibrantly red sky.

The departure of the aliens leaves an unmistakable mark on the landscape. The rumble of their takeoff, the intense roar of their ship's thrusters, blasts a hole in the sand that uncovers a part of Anchor long-buried outside of the dome. An area the length and breadth of two football fields put side by side, with tidy rows of...tombstones? Are those tombstones? They have lettering on them that glows faintly blue, getting slowly brighter as anyone approaches them. When someone gets close enough, a bright beam shoots from the top of the definitely-not-a-tombstone, scanning the person in front of it, and the marks on the metal tablets reorient into a readable language.

They're names. Names with a string of numbers underneath, and nonsense dates below that. Sometimes several nonsense dates are listed in a row down the front of each stone. Oftentimes, the names belong to strangers. Sometimes, though, they're familiar. Names of people who have come and gone in Anchor, sometimes listed on multiple different stones, each with a unique number underneath. Sometimes names of people that the Anchorites might know. May Parker, Jacob Seed, Samsara, Liara T'Soni, Perry Kelvin - the lists of the familiar go on. Sometimes, the names of current residents themselves are the names that appear on the tombstones.

b. arachnophobia!

Of course, it's not as simple as just walking out to the cleared area in a hazmat suit. That would be too easy. The noise of the alien ship's departure also woke something else up. Or perhaps more accurately, activated it.

A massive robotic spider, glowing with threads of the same light that illuminates the broad valley of marked stones, circles the space endlessly. The lucky can get to the stones without facing it, if they wait until it's on the farthest edge away, but the thing is fast and unfriendly and won't hesitate to attack someone careless. Or someone curious, even. And its legs conceal a variety of blasting weaponry that can do a whole lot of damage on their own. Even worse, when the eight glowing eyes all align on one spot, get the hell out of the way, or be caught in an incinerating green beam. Also, it...really likes stomping on things.

It can be defeated, if its carapace can be broken into and its insides destroyed, but you'd probably have to blind it first. Might be worth it, though. Those explosives in the legs might just come in real handy, and the parts inside the spider could be analyzed to reveal characteristics very similar to that weird humming orb thing buried in those caves - they even have their own faint hum.

c. ⱠɆ₮'₴ ₲Ɇ₮ ₱ⱧɎ₴ł₵₳Ⱡ.

Existential dread and monster battles not your thing? The bots have you covered. It is, after all, Physical Evaluation Day! Yay!

The medibots have set up an elaborate obstacle course in the park, one designed to test the speed, strength, and stamina of participants. It's a fairly standard military-style obstacle course, with climbing walls, mud pits to crawl through, ropes to climb, and huge monkey-bar sets with a potential drop into multicolored dye that just will not come off if you fall in. Y'know. Standard stuff.

There’s also...laser tag? If you want to add a little extra challenge to your obstacle course, sign up for a "combat sim" and face down fellow Anchorites and specially-programmed bots as you run the length of the obstacle course and try to stay "alive."

If you don't complete the obstacle course within a specific time designated by the medibots and arbitrarily changed every fifteen minutes or so, your reward is a full exam in the medical bay! Yay! You also get a half a gold star that says "effort" on it, but that's less exciting.

Fight all you want, but they will get that urine sample one way or another.

If you complete the obstacle course in the allotted time, you get a little metal star badge that says "I DID GOOD!" with a little etching of a cheering medibot underneath. Also you're gonna get showered with celebratory glitter.

Maybe the medical bay would have been better.

d. the network.

Need to get hold of someone, call for help, ask the city at large a question? Need to ask a friend to forge a doctor's note to get out of the obstacle course? 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.

Navigation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She points to the stone in front of her. In glowing letters is the word 'Faraway'.

"That was my mother's name."

And it's strange how seeing it makes her chest ache, even though it's been so long since her mother passed away. She draws her lower lip in between her teeth for a moment.

"But she's never been here."

“I don’t like it... this graveyard.”

Gokudera says and looks over at the tombstone he’d been inspecting before noticing Poison. “I found my name. Or maybe it was my mother’s... I don’t know what her name was.”

Let’s talk about dead moms.

"Mm..." Poison does not like it either, but thinks she's making that opinion fairly obvious. The back of her jaw tenses slightly. Sure, let's talk about dead moms...

"You never knew your mom?"

“She was my piano teacher, and she stopped showing up to teach me when I was three. I didn’t find out she was actually my mom until a couple years after she died.” He’d miss her if he actually could remember more about her. The only thing he remembers is that she was nice, warm, and she helped him play piano.

"Oh."

That's unusual. But... she must have had her reasons. Poison's general experience of mothers is a good one (not stepmothers, but certainly mothers).

"My mother just got sick. I still miss her."

"She was sick." He says so softly, understanding. "She didn't want me to grow attached to her and lose her. Didn't want to be around my father, either."

His mother loved them both, and separated from them to save them from pain, but he just wishes he'd known.

"Oh..."

That's sad, but it sounds like something her own mother would have done. She falls silent for a few moments, looking down at the stone in front of her. "It sounds like she loved you very much."

"I like to think so," But he's not sure if she would be proud of him after everything he's gone through, and everything he's done over the years.

"Anyways, that could have been my grave. I don't believe any of it. Think it's just meant to spook us or something." Gokudera has no idea why, but he'd seen things in the last world he'd inhabited where nothing came from the visions he was granted. Nothing changed, he's pretty sure, when his memories were altered.

"Well, obviously."

It is spooky, but Poison doesn't believe for a moment that her mother was ever actually here... or any of the other names she can see glowing on the stones.

"But how much does this place know about us? I've never mentioned my mother's name here. I've never even written it down."

Gokudera takes a long moment to mull over her question. He’s got some theories, and they’re all mostly unsettling.

“I don’t think I’m real. The place I came from didn’t have children, no fertility anywhere to speak of, not even real food. So for the past two years, I think I’m mostly just... a sort of subconscious mass of energy.

No idea how this world knows, but it probably has something to do with the portal. Maybe in arriving here, there is some part of you that is scanned. Like your entire brain, memories and all.

Just a thought, though. I have no idea what this world is capable of.”

She doesn't look too shocked by the theory. It makes sense, considering the kinds of things she's seen before here.

"I don't think I'm my original self," she tells him, tilting her head to one side and tucking her hair behind her ears. "I was in a place that made a clone of you when you died, and I died three times there."

And while she could no doubt easily find out the truth of the matter with the technology here, she still hasn't been able to stomach the possibility that she might never go home because she already is home.

"I don't think there is a true original self with anyone here. More like... we're downloaded into the portal from our home and that's it. The time in our home freezes because maybe it all came from our minds and it's all recreated as false memories.

Though, I know for a fact what I have been through and where has no impact on my home. Yamamoto Takeshi and I come from the same world, and roughly the same time. I spent two years on an Alien planet named Amoi, and he does not remember me missing for two years.

If there are clones of you on that world still, then they will likely develop their own memories of wherever they go, just as you'll do here." He huffs out a breath that usually would come out easier with a cigarette. Instead, it's just tension.

"It gets a little complicated if you think of alternate universes and clones. Have you ever died here?" He asks, thinking back on his network discussion with Kabal. How many people have died and come back?

"Downloaded? Like a computer program?"

The idea that she might be a clone is not the first time that Poison has come up against the fact that she may not be real. That she might be some kind of new level of fake, however, is not one that sits particularly well with her.

Even if she can't deny the possibility of it.

"I haven't died here. Yet."

"Yes, except I think we are more complicated than computer programs. We have memories and experiences and sometimes abilities from other worlds. I think the portal may be capable of something similar to downloading beings from other worlds. I'd have to research on it, though... It's just a theory."

He's mulled over stuff like this a lot before coming to Anchor. Had gotten into discussions with someone he considered a mentor, but no one had humored his existential crisis or the theories he came up with.

Not like on this world. Maybe because ~~Tanagura didn't allow CRAU? I don't remember?~~ he was never able to find like-minded individuals who had met three versions of the same person.

"Same. It feels awful to think about, but in the world I came from... Amoi, it operated in a caste system. If you had dark hair," A pause to look at her, "Black, brown, purple, or blue, you were considered an Elite. If you had light, or warm colored hair... white or silver, blonde, red, you were considered a mongrel. Elites were treated as their name implies. They were provided better housing, given a regular income, and so many luxuries, and a living will. Mongrels had to live in the slums and struggle to get by. We could only have living wills if we could afford them. So, I have never died because I could not afford a living will. I'd die and that would be it. I met Elites who had died and were revived through their wills. I don't think this world operates the same, but... I know there are people here who have died and come back."

"You could be in a caste based on the colour of your hair?"

The disbelief in her voice is clear. It isn't that she doesn't believe him, but more that the concept of something so abitrary is utterly ridiculous to her. One can't help the colour of hair they're born with, after all, no more than someone can help the shape of their nose or the bow of their lips.

They had been talking about something else, but she passes a very blunt judgement on that, and quite abruptly.

"That's stupid."

"Yeah."

Gokudera could go on and on about the horrible things that happened in that world, all of what made it stupid, and how it's done a number on him as a person. Made him feel like less of one, but that's just something he has to learn to disbelieve. Takeshi will help him with that, he's certain.

"A lot of that place was."

Poison gives the smallest shake of her head. It's one thing for people to be (wrongly) viewed as 'less' because they lack certain abilities or powers that other people do have, or because they come from somewhere different. Those things she can almost understand, even if she thinks they are ridiculous and wrong too.

But placing someone into a caste based on the colour of their hair is beyond anything she's heard of before.

"And no one did anything about it?"

“Oh plenty of people tried, but unlike this world, there were a lot of natives. People born into the world being Elite, like my father, and then people like me... and my half sister who were mongrels. Children were kept in a completely separated area from their parents, and my dad had vi...” he pauses, frowns.

“No wait. Scratch that, I uh...” Gokudera scratches at his temple.

“I wasn’t born there... I uh.” Wow he hasn’t had a slip-up like this since he was last on Amoi.

“I think I was there long enough that I was starting to lose my mind and become complacent to everything. Sometimes I forget I didn’t actually grow up there.”

She doesn't notice the slip at first or what it might mean, but there's a certain softening of her expression when he explains. If the caste system itself wasn't bad enough, they were meddling with people's minds as well..?

"How long were you there?"

Poison can empathise, in a way. She's been away from home for long enough now that sometimes she has her own doubts that she was ever there at all. She needs to remind herself, sometimes, just who she is.

Gokudera thinks that the caste system was there much longer than he ever was, enforced by the people native to that planet. He also knows that the castes flipped, but has no idea how that happened. As far as his brainwashing is concerned, people knew about it. It seemed the longer they lived on the planet, the more they started to believe they were native to it.

"Roughly two years..." He says, still frowning over his own mental gynastics.

"That's a long time."

As long as Poison had been in the Box, though they hadn't had a caste system there so much as a very real 'us and them' between the 'captives' and the Technicians. Lines could be crossed, however, and often were.

"Did the same thing happen to everyone?"

"It didn't feel that long."

The moments when he was alone felt the longest. When he fell in love, and then was left, picked up like a stray, then abandoned.

"Yeah. I knew it was going on after a few months, and so I kept a journal. It might have arrived here on Anchor with me..." He's not sure. "But I used to record things I remembered from home, things I noticed in that world. When I felt my mind slipping, I thought that looking back on it would help."

He sighs.

"It didn't, because my memories just sort of... shifted. Filled in all the blanks I hadn't written and changed the date. I knew the world would change me, but I didn't know how. And no one could help me, just assure me... and I had people from my home world, but they were all Elites. They'd wanted nothing to do with me." It's enough to make him feel sad, but he shakes his head. "Except Takeshi, but then he left too. I'm lucky I found him here."

"Like... brainwashing?"

It takes her a moment to realise who Takeshi is. She's never called him that, but she doesn't question it (she might ask Yamamoto himself, later). Strange, though, how some of them seem to have been drawn here in groups, while others were pulled in solo or as people she knew the faces of but who lacked the memories of the places they had been before.

She isn't kidding herself that she's going to figure out how this place works, but she's sure going to try.

"That's awful."

"Yeah, but there's someone here who helped me. Now I know what's a real memory and what isn't. I still slip up, but that may just be a sort of habit from that place?" He seems to be in good spirits about it. Having his mind back in order gives him more peace than he can describe.

"It's not so bad. I'm not alone anymore. I know that may not always be the case. People come and go. I'm sure it is like that in any world that isn't my home. I can only hope that if he leaves, I'll go back with him. So for now," He smiles at her. It's fine, see, not awful! "I'm going to make the most out of our time together."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

august 2020. welcome to the void.

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