redshiftlogs | august 2019. welcome to the void.

august 2019. welcome to the void.

Who: Everyone in Anchor.
What: Second Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of August 2019
Where: Around and outside the city.
Warnings: Please add any warnings in the subject lines.

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

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

a. bright spots in the darkness.

The redout and accompanying power outage has been going on for over a week now - even though someone must have managed to get the generators up and running so things are a little less dismal, that doesn't mean that everything is fun and games. The generators are enough to power the essentials, like lighting, the MedBay, resident sat phones, sanitation facilities...basically just the things that make life livable instead of kicking the whole city back to the dark ages.

Sometime during the second week, though, around the end of July, residents might start to notice bright spots in the darkness, mostly around the Agricultural levels. Little bobbing blobs of bright blue or vibrant green or glowing red that move soundlessly through the night, poignantly noticeable because everything else is so dark. At first, and from a distance, they might look like your typical swamp gas fake ghost, little glowing smudges in the darkness. Could be promising...but it could be dangerous too.

If residents are brave enough to head up to the Agricultural levels in the darkness and investigate the source of the light, a mildly harrowing mission, they will find that the source of the glowing is...animals. Barely differing from the usual animals one might see in a daylight in the Agricultural levels, these animals prove to simply be nocturnal versions of the usual animals that might survive in the wild and who have made their homes in the faux forest and grasslands. And when everything else is dark, these creatures roam the night, letting off a curious and almost radioactive glow.

There are, however, a slightly wider variety of these animals, who are descendants of animals exposed heavily to radiation that mutated but did not kill them. While there are the usual deer and wild horses, foxes and monkeys, rodents and insects, there are also domestic creatures that seem to have thrived in their glow-in-the-dark forms where non-glowing ones were picked off by predators. Anyone investigating may find glowing kittens and puppies, domestic mice and rats, snakes that are open to being touched, and even a few more exotic domesticated pets like ferrets, hedgehogs, turtles and foxes. While these creatures are still wild, they are the descendants of domestic stock, and with a little effort and coddling, they might turn out to be passable pets, once they're scanned in the MedBay and found to not give off dangerous radiation.

It's not all puppies and kittens, though. Some of these seemingly predatorless glow-in-the-dark creatures are mutated, just like their regular counterparts, but to a more extensive degree. Keep a close eye out while you're trying to tame that adorable glowing purple kitten, because you might find yourself as the prey to a huge mutated lizard or spider, or maybe an oversized glowing wild warthog.

Nighttime exploring, after all, is for the brave at heart...and comes with pros and cons!

b. nightmare swarm.

As if the mutated glow-in-the-dark creatures in the Agricultural levels aren't bad enough, there's something new in Anchor to cause problems. A couple of weeks after the generator room was opened, strange apparitions start showing up in various places around the city. At first they're nebulous clouds that gather in places where there's strong evidence of past violence - in the upper levels of the city where there's serious fire damage, near the security station, hovering outside the armory or wherever there are burns and gouges into the stone walls of the city. But as the month wears on, the clouds start to take shape, and some of those shapes might be very familiar.

Starting at around August 8th, whenever a resident passes by one of these ominous clouds, it will start to coalesce into a solid form, the particles coming together into a concrete shape - the shape of fear. Whether the particles coalesce into the shape of a monster or villain from a character's homeworld or previous game setting, the nebulous representation of their worst fear, a person or thing from their past that evokes a terrible memory of trauma, or even just a generic horrific monster that would particularly frighten that particular person, it's something that is guaranteed to terrify. Essentially, they will turn into the worst thing that your character can imagine.

And these representations of fear? They're not ghosts, they're not digital afterimages, they're not apparitions or holos. They're real, or at least they feel real, they can do real damage, and they're almost impossible to kill. The best way to survive an encounter with the nightmare swarm? Run fast. Because they're generally confined to areas where the echoes of old violence linger, and the quicker you leave those areas the better. Get into whatever light you can, get somewhere safe, and the fear creature will dissipate back into a nebulous cloud, lying in wait for the next victim.

c. power up.

On August 2nd, the dust storm causing the redout and power outage will subside, and a stiff wind will take its place, washing away about two thirds of the red sand piled up on the dome. This fortuitous change in weather will make it possible to start work on getting the power back up. Residents will be able to exit the city through the usual channels so they can work on clearing the dust out of the various installations outside the city that transform wind and radiation and sunlight into power that keeps the city up and running. After they're cleared off, residents can start to get the power up by making repairs to the dust-damaged computer systems. Thankfully, once the power installations outside the city have been cleared off, an automated computer subroutine will boot up on some of the computer panels in the common areas of the residential quarters, with a user-friendly guide to repairing sand damage to the power system.

Mind you, the user guide assumes that residents have a lot of tools, supplies, and assistant bots that the current population doesn't really have on hand, so user-friendly or not, it's tougher than the system seems to think it is.

Thankfully, there is another option. Anyone with a particularly tech-savvy mind who's encountered the nightmare clouds might have picked up on it already, but the clouds are actually swarms of nanites. Released from the room that held the generators, these nanites were originally intended to conduct repairs on the city (there was a reason that room and those generators were so pristine!) that have been corrupted and are malfunctioning due to the ambient radiation in the city that has only increased since their creation. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of computers (and a very strong spine) could collect a sample of the clouds in one of the containment units from the labs or the R&D area, where the semi-functioning computer can be used to work out what's wrong with the nanites...and fix them.

If characters are able to work this out and deploy repairs to the various swarms around the city, those nanites might be super helpful for fixing some of the malfunctioning tech around the city. Food for thought!

d. the wreckage in the wasteland.

Once the emergency situation with the power is sorted out, residents might become a little curious about what caused all the trouble in the first place. The dust storm was, after all, initiated by a loud crash landing outside the city. With the dust storm abated and the windows in the Observation Area cleared off, residents will be able to see the wreckage of a spacecraft crashed into the ground, several miles out from the city. Far enough away to make it impossible to see any identifying marks, but close enough to be a tantalizing mystery for anyone so inclined.

Adventurous souls will be able to suit up and trek their way out to the site of the crash in the battery Jeeps to see what's going on, risking the rough ever-changing terrain and the possibility of a red shift, to see what might be salvageable from the crashed ship, or just in pursuit of knowledge. Once those characters approach, they will find the hulk of a badly-damaged spacecraft, about as big as a medium-sized cruise ship. The hull is badly burned, with tears in the metal, and it will be obvious to anyone who's got any experience with space travel (or even anyone who's watched enough sci-fi movies) to see that the ship didn't do well on its slow fall through the atmosphere. The metal is melted and punctured, anything that might have extended away from the hull has been burned off and lies in tatters, and the sand around the crash site is littered with metal and plastic debris.

But the one thing that's still possible to tell from the wreckage? It probably came from Anchor.

The ship is pieced together from salvaged materials, the tech will be familiar to anyone who's been in the colony for more than a couple days, and there's even a few corpses of very familiar bots lying in the sand. Approaching a large tear in the side of the hull will reveal a way inside the husk of a ship, giving access to the ship's small crew quarters section. If explorers choose to proceed inside, they'll be able to dig through what few personal items remain and find personal tablet computers and sat phones with their hard drives corrupted but possibly salvageable with the right skillset and the right technology repaired back in Anchor. They will also be able to find a way down further into the ship, though it's dark and clouded with sand and...well, quite menacing.

Because it isn't just the darkness and the danger of the red shift coming while you're trapped down there, or the danger of the ship's hull cracking with the weight of the sand piled up on its shell from the dust storm...but looking into the darkness, there's a flickering bluish glow. Digital and glitchy, it flickers from wall to wall, with the faintest impression of a human form. A face. A hand. The movement of hair or clothing. And then there's the echoing sounds - soft laughter, snippets of childrens' rhymes, unintelligible whispers or mumbles.

Well. Enter at your own risk.

ooc: exploration info.

As you can probably tell, this final prompt is kind of a doozy! While the first level of the ship is available for anyone to explore with the information provided in the prompt, going further into the ship will require mod guidance, via an NPC.

Any questions can be asked in the mod questions thread below, and if your characters have progressed to the point of wanting to explore deeper in the ship, please hit up the NPC request thread with a link to where the NPC should tag in.

Have fun guys!

Navigation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Patch needs to do something. She doesn't want to do anything, but she needs to. If she doesn't, if she just keeps sitting here... it won't be good. She's got not one to blame but herself. She wanted to know the reason she died. Now she does. Can't change it. Can't quite get over it, either.

Finding the motivation is hard, though. Luckily, there's Peter.

Pick a vehicle and grab us some radiation suits. I'll meet you in the garage.

She knows better than to think she's going to stop Peter from doing anything that he sets his mind to doing. She's not going to let him go alone, though.

[[OOC: Feel free to have Peter already be gone, if you want. Once Patch gets down there, it'll be her excuse to just take a vehicle on her own and do something dumb.]]

[[OOC: I figure Peter's the kind of person who would definitely go back a few times, so I'm cool with playing Calvinball with the timelines and saying this is some time after his trip out with Poison if you'd like for him and Patch to drive out together. I am super flexible.]]

If there's one thing Peter's good for, it's motivating people to get off their butts. That motivation may just be stopping Peter from doing a dumb thing, but it still totally counts.

Already looking at some radiation suits, I wanna make sure I don't grab any with leaks.

[[OOC: works for me!]]

Patch is jogging down to the garage, eager to burn off some energy, especially eager for Peter's first attempt at driving to not be out in the desert entirely on his own in one of these hulking things that seem to each have at least one major problem. She's almost there when she sees his text, and so doesn't bother answering on the device, which is bulky and a little awkward.

"No leaks, good plan. Dying sucks."

Oh, look at that, almost glib, right there.

"So, you pick a truck yet? Cause I'm thinking, the bigger the tread, the better." She points to one of the trucks with some seriously beefy off-roading tires, the kind you need to plant at least one foot on to be able to get through the door of the cab. "And I happen to have already been under the hood of that one."

Technically it wouldn't be his first time behind the wheel. His aunt had let him drive a little in parking lots, and there was that one time he stole Flash's dad's car. And wrecked it. Yeah, probably best not to let Peter try to tackle this driving thing on his own. He'd probably come out of it in one piece, but that doesn't mean the truck would.

"I would like to avoid the whole dying thing, yeah. But uh, yeah. These suits are good, sounds like you've already got the truck covered. I think we're good to go."

"All right, Kid-o." Doesn't matter that Peter is almost a legal adult, or that he is worlds smarter than Patch. He's giving her serious nephew vibes, and that makes him Kid-o. No way around it. "Let's suit up and get out there."

She holds her hands out for one of the radiation suits he's checked, and then begins pulling it on over her clothing. Though, first thing she does is remove her extra clips of ammo from the little holder at her lower back. She sets them on one of the high tables around the perimeter of the room, along with her guns. These are staying outside the suit this time. She doesn't quite trust anything out there in the desert, after Creepy Joe, and a ship that big didn't crash because it was empty.

Doesn't mean anything is still alive in it, but something definitely once was, and it still might be. She's going to go ahead and play it safe.

Peter doesn't mind nick names. He'd been called "kid" enough times to where it doesn't feel out of place, but it has been a while. Might take some getting used to again, but he's perfectly fine with it.

After handing Patch her radiation suit, he pulls his on as well. He's had to modify his a bit, the material around the hands and wrists had been too bulky for him to wear his web shooters over. After his fun little adventure with Creepy Joe, he'd decided that he was never leaving Anchor without them equipped again. Once he's suited up and has his web shooters on, he turns his attention back to Patch.

"I'm good when you are. You uh, gonna need something to carry those with?"

Not that he'd seen any gun holsters just lying around, but maybe they could re-purpose one of the tool belts for her to stick her ammo in? He doesn't know guns, man.

"I was kinda thinking--" Patch cuts off and points behind him, at a row of utility belts hung on hooks over by the tools area. Will it be perfect? No. Her own holster won't expand to accommodate being work over the suit, though, and she's not about to destroy it. She still needs it to fit the way it's meant to when she's inside the city. "It's not going to be perfect, but it's better than being unarmed."

Now that she's got the suit on over her body, and before she bothers with the gloves or helmet, she moves to get one of them and see what she can do. "What are those?" Because of course she couldn't possibly miss him strapping the web shooters onto his own wrists. "Something you made down in R & D?" With those printers working, she assumes the sky is the limit for Peter.

He glances briefly over his shoulder when she points out the utility belts, "the might be a little on the bulky side, but yeah. It's better than nothing. Who knows what we're gonna find out there."

He's not expecting much. Even from here, the wreck looks pretty bad. Like, 'there's no way anyone survived that' levels of bad. But you never know, life's thrown him enough surprises that he tries to be ready for anything. Like Patch suddenly asking him about his weird equipment.

"Oh, no. These are from home. They uh, shoot webs. Like, spider webs."

Patch gets a belt down from the wall, and is busy with a knife cutting into it to modify one of the pouches to fit and secure a gun. She stops when he explains his tech, though. "They shoot... spider webs?" She's trying to wrap her mind around that one. She's failing. "You've seen spider webs, right? We're talking about the same thing? How big are spiders where you come from? Cause where I come from they're mostly, about--" she holds up her fingers an inch or so apart-- "and their webs aren't exactly the stuff of bullets. A stiff breeze will take them down."

"Yeah, no, spiders are the same where I'm from. These webs are synthetic."

He doesn't have time to go into all the nerdy chemistry details right now, but a live demonstration couldn't hurt. He fires a thin strand of web to the side of the space Jeep and holds on to the other end, motioning for her to come over.

"I've stopped cars and steered a plane with this stuff before, it can more than support my weight. Here, try to break it."

Patch is skeptical, but she's also not about to just outright dismiss him. That would be shitty. So she doesn't see how it's going to hold up to the weight and strength of one full grown woman, let alone a car. But she's absolutely going to indulge him.

So she walks over and grabs the string, giving it a good tug. It has a little bit of give, but it doesn't break. Huh. That's pretty impressive. She wraps her hand around it more completely, and pulls as hard as she can against where it's stuck to the jeep. Nothing. All right. She walks a few steps closer, wraps the strand several times around her forearm, and then braces one foot on the jeep and pulls, slowly and steadily, again as hard as she can. After a few moments, she raises her other foot to also plant it on the jeep. She is now entirely off the ground, standing on the jeep, and trying to pull this one thin thread of white webbing off of it. She's failing.

All right," she says, ever so slightly out of breath as she returns her feet to the ground. "You made this stuff? You are officially the smartest person on the planet. You know that, right?"

He's not the sort who lets praise like that go to his head, but he can't help but grin. Mostly he's amused by her attempt at breaking his web, like, she didn't half ass that at all, she really went all out on it. Credit where it's due, man.

"Yeah, I made it. My first couple formulas for it were made of stuff I picked up in my school's chem lab. I've had to get a little creative since then, I didn't really have access to the same stuff in Hadriel. But nah, I wouldn't say I'm the smartest person here. Like, maybe when it comes to science and tech? But there are plenty of people here that are great at things that I just have no talent for."

Like anything plant related. Don't ask this boy to grow a tree. Anyway, he's going to just take a moment here to pull that web off the jeep and. Just. Drop it on the table. That was anticlimactic.

Patch doesn't half-ass anything. She full-asses it. Always. In this case, she might have one-and-three-quarters-assed it, and she's not at all upset at being bested by his invention. "Look, there's skill, which is different than intelligence. Being skilled doesn't necessarily mean being smart. One is not more valuable than the other, but it's different. Just take the compliment, kid-o."

She goes back to re-purposing the tool belt to hold her guns and additional clips of ammo, but Peter has retained a little bit of her focus. Is it the normal teenage awkwardness? That feeling of your skin now quite fitting, of the hole you're meant to fill in the world being an ever so slightly different shape than you?

"Okay, okay. Thanks for the compliment."

There mom, he has accepted this compliment and will hold it close to his heart forever. Or something.

Also this is probably half normal teenage awkwardness. The other half is a constant looming fear that if he ever screws something up in a place like this, it's gonna probably get everyone super killed. So, he tries not to let himself get too distracted, tries not to let anything go to his head. If he gets too confident he might get cocky, and that's when mistakes start getting made.

But anyway he seems to have finished packing up his gear and loading it into the space jeep. Huzzah!

"Ready to go when you are."

Patch finishes with her makeshift harness. "Ready. Let's hit it." It'll have to do. Temporarily, anyway.

She heads for the truck, pulling herself up into the cab.

"So, do you think you could make me a harness that would fit over this suit? Is that the kind of thing you can work on? Maybe... print the actual holsters, pad them out with some sort of insulation or something? I can probably make the straps myself."

Peter hops up into the other seat and hell YES it's time for some badass off-roading adventures.

"Oh yeah, I could totally do that. I'll make it my first project. I need something kind of simple to test the printer out on anyway, and that would be perfect. Uh- seat belts, does this thing have seat belts..."

It does, in fact, have seat belts, and Peter buckles himself in. Not that Spider-Man needs seat belts, but y'know. Habit.

Edited 2019-08-25 02:08 (UTC)

Patch smiles. Good. She's glad to help, and also to be helped. She'll feel much better, with everything she needs close at hand, no matter the situation. She puts on her safety restraint while Peter does the same. Then, after a moment - "Between your legs." When that doesn't immediately explain itself, Patch reaches down between her own, and pulls up an additional strap, meant to click into the bottom of the buckle in the center of their chests. Presumably for if the vehicle rolls, and Patch isn't sure what they're going to find out there. Seems prudent.

Once they're ready to go, she pokes around until she finds the control for the first set of sliding doors that will let them out onto the surface. Patch assumes that ones they pass through these, they won't open behind them without sending everything through a decontamination procedure, and they will have to continue through the next (currently closed) set, so she asks: "You sure you've got everything?"

Ah hah, one of them crotch straps. Peter snaps together all of his snappies and is good to go. Well, he'll be good to go after he's double checked that he's brought extra web fluid, which he has, so. Thumbs up.

"Yep, I'm good. I'd thought about bringing snacks along, but considering the like, head gear? Yeah, not really worth it."

"So." Patch starts the vehicle, and pauses with her hand resting lightly on the gear shifter. "Do you just not have your license, or do you not know how to drive at all? Has anyone ever taken you out and shown you how it all works?"

Needing a driver could cover all manner of issues, from total ignorance, to a simple lack of confidence. Patch doesn't want to sit here preaching like an ass if he already has the knowledge and just doesn't feel like using it right now. Which would be totally valid. Driving this hulking thing out onto the surface of an alien planet is a legitimate reason to defer.

Peter just shrugs, glancing around at the inside of the vehicle a bit before he turns his attention to Patch.

"Well, uh. My aunt let me drive her car around in parking lots a couple times, and uhh... I kind of stole a classmate's car and... completely totaled it because I had no idea what I was doing, but! In my defense, I needed it to chase a bad guy. Getting off topic, uh, I dunno, like mechanically I know how the car is supposed to work? But I don't have a lot of experience actually driving, and I'm from New York City so I mostly just take the subway-- took the subway. And the webs, I used to just swing between the buildings to get around."

Patch smirks, and shakes her head. "All right. Crash course. Three pedals, yeah? Clutch, brake, accelerator." She taps each with her foot as she names it. "You work this one with your left foot, these two with your right. When the clutch is down, it's disengaged, no torque from engine to transmission, this is when you can shift gears. Release the pedal, and you're engaged, this locks your gear in. You do the shifting here. This is a standard H, which is good. Kind of, weird, to find it on an alien planet, I suppose... but good. It's intuitive." Patch presses down on the clutch and the brake at the same time, and moves the knob through its options. "First gear, second, third, fourth, fifth, reverse, and hiding right here is neutral. It's usually not marked. Always make sure you check the pattern in a new car, because if you get a dog leg, reverse will be where you're expecting first, and you'll have a very shitty day. With me so far?"

Peter listens intently, leaning over to see the pedals better, making little mental notes of everything she explains. A lot of this stuff he already knows, just because he reads a lot, but reading about it and actually experiencing it are two different things.

"I'm with you. Except I don't know what a dog leg is? But everything else makes sense. It's just uh, I've only ever driven automatic. And by driven, I mean destroyed, but I think it still counts."

That was a joke. Kind of.

"It's another configuration. Unlike a standard H, a dog leg has reverse up here, in the upper left." She taps the place where first gear is located in this vehicle. "Always check. It's pretty common in larger vehicles. So, say, that thing over there?" She nods her head through the windscreen at a much larger transport style truck. "That could very well be a dog leg. Always check."

Right now, she just wants to get moving. "All right, shifting into first gear. Here we go." She goes through the motions with exaggeration, so that Peter can see what she's doing. He's a smart guy. She assumes that he'll be able to learn by watching her, and if he can't, he'll ask questions. She takes them through the first set of doors, lets it close behind them and waits for the second one to open and admit them onto the planet's surface. "Now that we're out here, probably best to shift to a higher gear. If you're smooth, you shouldn't feel the change." Then, she demonstrates, barely a hiccup as she works the clutch and gears and gets them really moving. "Any questions so far?"

Peter pays very close attention to what she's doing and what she's saying. So far it's all pretty straight forward, and since he's a giant nerd who loves to learn new things, he's totally going to ask to drive on the way back.

"No, none yet. Figure I might have some once I'm doing it myself. I'm more of a hands-on learner that way, I guess."

He might stall the Jeep a couple times on the way back, but hey. It's all part of the learning experience right??

"Well then, you watch me drive out there, and then you can try driving back." Great minds and all that. She pauses, just slightly. "Provided nothing is chasing us. If something is on our six, we run like hell and I'm flooring it back to the city." Patch has always gotten very high marks in her driving courses through the department. She'd bet on herself in a high speed chase.

She's hoping that won't be necessary, though, and she drives out to the wreck with the practiced ease of someone who has been comfortable with cars and trucks since her early teens. She narrates everything she does, and exaggerates what movements she can - for example, moving her entire leg, instead of just pivoting her foot on her heel, so that Peter can have a solid visual cue for when she must engage the different pedals. He's a smart kid, he'll pick it up quickly, and she wants to encourage that to the best of her ability.

august 2019. welcome to the void.

wreckage quest

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