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

Cho jumps a little when Cole seems to just appear beside her. Heck of a quiet one, this guy. Like a little mouse. It's a pretty neat skill, actually. Cho was forced to spend her whole childhood learning how to go unnoticed, and even she's not that good. It's impressive.

Bit of an odd one. She looks over at him, trying to read his expression, but she's never been great at that. Not with people she doesn't know well. "I... don't want to fight. There must be way to survive this place without having to fight." Which, all right, she knows that's not exactly possible. Three guys had to fight to get her out of the last horrible situation she ended up in, she's aware of that. "I don't want to die. I think, if I had to fight to survive, I think I would. Not sure it would help." It's an odd conversation to be having with anyone, especially someone she doesn't know. "Were you thinking of going up there, too?"

"Cole was forgotten, so people do'n't see me either. Not unless I remember to let them. Being seen and noticed is frightening. You know that."

He says it very casually, conversationally. His face is largely hidden under his hat, face tilted down a touch to hide him.

"Fighting is natural. Less so for me, but I'm very good at it now. Mortal things have to fight, to survive, that's how it works. You know that, more than lots of people, but only up here." He taps his head. "You don't feel it the same way. I'm going up if you are, because the things up there will eat you." He shrugs and turns to show her his back.

The knives on the harness are long, sharp and clearly well handled.

Cho opens her mouth, then closes it. Huh. There's a lot to unpack there. "Who is Cole? Who are you?" Which is not something she should ask. She should wait for people to offer their names, but this is super weird, all of it, and maybe that means she's allowed to be. "I'm Cho." That makes it a tiny bit better, maybe?

The comment about fighting is super unsettling. Does he mean the network post she made about being in trouble? Needing help? He must. Everyone was able to see that. It's a logical conclusion, and so she holds on to it.

"I'm Cole now. He was Cole before. He died, when I was Compassion, so I became Cole." There's a lot more to unpack in that, but it's the simplest explanation.

"Yes, I know. Salt water and crushing depths, but the deep is less weight than their expectations. If you want to explore, I'll help you. Keep you safe from the hungry ones, the feral creatures. I can keep them from hurting you."

None of that makes sense. Not a word. Well, no, that's not true. The words make sense, on their own, just not together. Why would he be talking about the ocean, when there isn't one here? About the crushing depths, what she assumes is meant to be a metaphor for her life drawn from her education and career, except she hasn't talked to anyone here about it. She knows she hasn't. So where is it coming from? How does he know?

He's right about one thing, though - the knives on his back are protection, and Diego did tell her not to go anywhere without a buddy from now on. He risked his life for her, the least she owes him is a little compliance. She swallows thickly around her tongue, which suddenly feels a little too large for her mouth. "All right. Let's go." Then, after a moment. "They can't all be dangerous. Some of them are so small. Do you see them? Those tiny little lights? I want to know how they survive up there. With--" Teeth and claws and crocodile eyes and snapping jaws and heart pounding terror. "Everything else."

"Before I was Cole, I was Compassion." He says each of those names with a capital, which shouldn't be audible and yet somehow is. "I know what people feel and think, what hurts and what helps. I know you, not your body."

It almost makes sense, he knows that, but it's the best he's going to get to. "Being small doesn't mean helpless. Nadezhda was very small, even for a dwarf, but that didn't make her any less dangerous or cunning. You're small, but you never need to be helpless again." He leans forward, canting his head slightly to let her see his face, pallid and gaunt and sad, sad eyes. "I can teach you. To weaponise your silence, their assumptions about you. Not right this moment, but I can teach you to make yourself dangerous, when you want."

"You... weren't always human." She says it slowly, like she's worried she sounds crazy, and at the same time more than a little scared that it's not true. Because if he's not human, if he's something more, then maybe he can see something more, and maybe what he sees in her is real?

She's scared again, but now she's scared that she's wrong, that Cole isn't what she thinks he is. She would love to be strong, to be able to take care of herself, to not be The Burden she's been raised to believe that she is, the drain on her family, useless in almost every way and in their debt for her very existence. She wants to be good enough, all on her own, it's all she's ever wanted. To just be good enough all on her own.

"No. I'm not human. But I was less human before, I was just spirit. Just Compassion. Then I gained Cole's memories and feelings and I became Mercy. Now, I'm me. And I call myself Cole." He nods slightly. "You are not a burden. Protecting you is an action of affection and caring, not burdening on your part. Some people need to protect others and if you let them protect you, you give to them. You give them fulfillment. But you should know how to protect yourself, in case there's no one to give that trust to. We'll find you a knife. A good knife."

All right, that's just spooky. She wants it to be true, though. Is her face so easy to read? Is she such an open book? Plenty of people would tell her yes, that she's easy to take advantage of because she trusts so readily. It's so spot on, though. He's answering her thoughts. And if he's not, she doesn't want to know. Not yet.

So she just nods her head, a little dumbly, trying to find words. "All right." That's all that comes out. It's what she can manage. Hopefully it's enough. "We should-- Not now, though. We--" He said he was going if she went, to protect her. So she clears her throat. "I'm going up there, to try and catch one of the smaller creatures. You're coming with me?"

"I can hear what you say, with your soul, not your body. What happened to mark your soul and shape it, the things you want and need people to understand that make you." He draws one of the knives, a curved and elegant thing. "This is Silkdart. Nadezhda gave it to me, so fragile, spun glass cooled too quickly, needs to be able to look after himself. Silkdart sheathes easily."

He nods again. "Ready."

Cho takes a tentative step forward, and then another, worried that Cole won't follow her, worried that he will. It's strange to feel such pure and desperate hope. She's not sure why it feels that way, because she's always been hopeful. She's hoped to be loved by her family, and when that fell through, she'd hoped to find friends that she could love, who would love her. She's hoped for a fulfilling career, to make a difference, to be seen and heard and valued. She's hoped her whole life to be really known by someone, and now that it's happened, she's afraid.

Afraid that she's damaged. Cho is afraid that the reason she's never felt that anyone saw her or heard her or really loved her and not just the idea of what she represented to them is because deep down, she's flawed, broken past the point of being lovable. She has so much to give, and you don't love with the expectation of getting something in return, but if all she ever does is give, one day she's going to run empty, isn't she? Is that the real danger of letting someone truly see her is, that they won't like what they find, and she'll lose them? And if Cole can really hear her soul, then he must know, and he could tell her, and then she'd know. And once she knows, she can't take any of it back.

"Do you see the bad things?" she asks as they walk, quietly, unable to look at him.

Cole follows.

He moves to fill her blindspot, even if she doesn't know that's what that position is, and he twists Silkdart in his fingers, the familiar weight and glide the knife soothing in the wake of Cho's anxiety and fear washing pover and past him.

It's not overpowering. He can cope with her fear.

"I see lots of things. I see some with my eyes and some I don't see with my eyes," he answers her.

"I mean--" God, she doesn't want to ask. Now that she has an out, she doesn't want to ask him, but it's tumbling through her mind all the same. So he knows it already, doesn't he? She wants to know if he sees the bad things in her, the things she does wrong, whatever it is that makes her unlovable, that's caused her family to view her as an asset and not something to adore, that caused Gabriel to drop her friendship the very instant she was no longer entertaining, as soon as something more important came along in his life. She wants to know if he can see whatever it is inside of her that's bad and broken.

She takes a shaky breath. "It's not important." Nothing that she wants is ever important, she knows that. She's permitted autonomy at the whim of the people around her, and when they decide that it's inconvenient, she'll lose it again. That's just what life is, for her. Right now, she needs test subjects, animals to collect samples from, to look for a commonality. She needs a project. So she takes the steps with more enthusiasm, with more speed and certainty.

Cole pauses and takes a breath. "Cho. There's nothing wrong with you. Their lack of affection, of love? That's them, not you. People who use others? That's something wrong in them, not in the people they hurt.

"There's nothing wrong in you."

She needs to hear it, so he tells her. The whole hearted truth.

"There never was. There was something wrong in them."

Oh God, she's not going to cry. She's not. Nope. Not happening. She won't do it. Not right now. She's got things to do. She clears her throat a few times, until the tightness passes. "Thank you." Because she honestly doesn't know what else to say.

He tilts his head and looks at her and maybe it's just the light, but he seems a tiny bit less corpselike than he did moments earlier. "You're welcome."

It's a shaking breath or two before she's able to regain some semblance of composure, but then she's even more focused on the task at hand. "So if you're Cole now, you remember being forgotten?" Now that her own fears and worries aren't rattling quite so loudly in her mind, she can think back on the things he's said about himself, the things that she's curious about.

"Yes. I remember everything Cole experienced. And then my own experiences as Cole." He empathised and became him and it was the moment that rewrote the history of Thedas, even if Cole doesn't understand that himself.

Cho's frown is back, but it's not for her, and the noise in her head is not quite so loud this time. "I'm so sorry, that you were forgotten, that you have to remember being forgotten." It's a horrible thing, painful and unfair. No one should have to go through it.

She looks back at him, at where he's walking in her blind spot, which is how she recognizes it as her blind spot, that she has to turn to see him, nothing even in her peripheral vision. lt should be unsettling, having him back there, but it's not. The physical proximity doesn't worry her. "You know, some people say that our trials will make us stronger. Do you think that's true?"

"It was a slower death than he ever expected but... it was also less violent." He had expected his father's murderous fists, or the Templars' blade.

He considers it. "No. Not really. Sometimes, they leave wounds and those wounds scar on our soul and the scar tissue doesn't hurt, but it's not stronger. Just different. Trials change us. Sometimes, they help us learn things, make wiser, or kinder, or sometimes not. I don't think adversity inherently makes anyone 'stronger'."

"I suppose you're right." It's sort of a depressing thought, that the things that have happened in her life that have hurt her may have had no purpose other than to hurt her, no benefit to gain from the experience. It's nicer to believe that they've made her stronger, somehow, but life doesn't always give you what you want. Then again, the difference between the pair of them is fairly stark. Cole looks like he's ready to wage war, and Cho looks like she's about to go to the pressed juice place and then meet up with her friends to power walk around central park or take a hot yoga class.

Ahead of them, crawling slowly along a wall overgrown with some kind of foliage that Cho doesn't recognize, is a little lizard. It's roughly the size of her palm, and when it begins to pass over a large clump of leaves, the green colour that it's glowing seems to get a little bit brighter. Cho sets down the carrier, and pulls a pair of long, thick gloves out of the waistband of her leggings, slipping them on before she makes a slow approach on the little creeping reptile. Much less terrifying than her last reptile encounter, to be sure.

"They just happen. but if you can find a less to learn from it, then your suffering has some meaning. You learn not to let another person treat you that way, or you learn the signs of someone who doesn't have your well being in their heart.

They might make you stronger. They might not. That's up to you, not because they happened."

Cole crouches down nearby. He's watching around them, making sure nothing tries to make a meal of them.

He also has a small family of mice climbing over his foot within moments, apparently completely unconcerned by his presence.

Cho is pretty fully focused on the lizard. Cole said he could protect her. She believes him. She trusts him to be on the lookout for things that might harm him, and it lets her be fully focused on the chameleon. Her movements are slow and fluid, and she speaks softly, broadcasting her location to make herself seem less like a predator. There's a ficus growing beside her, perhaps the little guy's end goal. She pulls off a few leaves and cups them in her hand, patiently waiting for him to come to her.

It's the movement of the mice over Cole's feet that bring her attention in that direction. "How cute. They seem to really like you."

"Most animals like me. They know me for what I am. And I like them." He dips a hand down to drag a fingertip over one mouse's head and spine, the tail curling around his finger briefly. "Is there anything else you want to have? I can probably get them to come here to you."

"I like them, too," Cho says with a smile, tucking the lizard that has climbed onto her hand into one of the smaller containers that divides the inside of the animal carrier into a kind of specimen condominium. She's very concerned with keeping the creature calm and comfortable, with not scaring or hurting it.

The problem with having Cole help her look, is that she isn't really certain what she's looking for. Though she does appreciate his offer. "There isn't anything specific. I'm looking for prey animals, anything that doesn't have an obvious way to defend itself against a predator. They have no functional camouflage, yet they're surviving up here. I want to figure out why. So I guess I'm just... looking or anything that seems pretty helpless."

Another animal has come to investigate Cole, similar to the mice, but so much larger, and quite a bit fluffier. Cho recognizes it, after a few moments, as a relatively small chinchilla glowing an intense jewel tone indigo, and she smiles. "Like that little one," she says, nodding her head at it as it comes over to sniff Cole's foot.

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