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

"I always have to explain. Even in Thedas, I don't make sense. Solas called me unique and he knows more about spirits than anyone else I ever knew of."

Being guided to sit is strange. Cole usually helps others, having Ben help him, like he's frail, it's strange. Not bad, but unfamiliar after so long.

"I come from Thedas. There's the mortal world, and the Fade. The Fade is where dreams and spirits live. I'm a spirit. Compassion. When people care, I know. When they need someone to care, I know. That's what I am. Yes?" He hopes that that much is clear.

If it were someone else, Ben might interject that there isn't anything wrong with unique, that he in particular doesn't know how he would ever relate to or befriend someone who was profoundly 'normal'. But he really does want that explanation, and is worried saying something might send Cole off on a tangent. And besides - Cole already knows he is thinking that, right? Or that he's feeling it at least.

"I'm with you so far."

The idea that a spirit like that could exist would have thrown him for a loop at some point, but he's been in the Anchor for a little while. Just because they haven't got something like Compassion on Earth doesn't mean that's true everywhere and everywhen. Apparently Thedas is a place where there's a spirit world called the Fade, and Cole's some sort of avatar of compassion. Which gives him some kind of emotion radar to tell him when people are having a shitty day.

But it's more complicated than that, and that's where Ben's understanding falters. So he folds his hands together, leaning in a little, and waits for Cole to continue.

Cole pauses at Ben's thoughts on unique, because there's a difference between 'not normal' and 'the only one of your kind to ever exist'. But Ben is content to let it pass, so Cole does too.

"Compassion isn't a strong spirit. It breaks easily. But... Compassion was drawn to a place to suffering, to a spirit medium who had been made to live through such terrible things and he was alone, forgotten by his jailers, starving and exhausted and terribly alone.

"His name was Cole. And Compassion reached out to him, because all Cole wanted was to not die alone and forgotten. He wanted Compassion and so Compassion came to him as he died."

"Oh."

Ben feels a pang of sadness so intense it's almost a physical sensation, as the pieces come together. He assumes a spirit medium is someone able to contact the spirits that exist in Thedas - the same way that Klaus can contact the dead. And from the sound of it, this spirit medium had been through an awful lot. Locked up and starved and hurt and alone and dying.

He looks down at his hands, twisting his fingers together as he reconciles the things he's heard Cole say before, the way he doesn't seem only like an otherworldly detached spirit, and doesn't seem only like a human who is hurting. With dawning realization and the first glimpses of understanding, he guesses:

"And you're... both of them?"

"Compassion absorbed all of Cole's emotions and memories and... what made him him. Cole wished he had a life where he wasn't a mage and Compassion wanted to make him less unhappy."

It had badly damaged Compassion.

"It was... hard. I forgot what I was and all I could remember was that something terrible happened and now no one could see me. No one could interact with me. No one tried to hurt me. Eventually, I remembered I was Compassion who became Cole. I remember both now. But no other spirit has ever... been like this. As much mortal in thought as spirit. I understand linear time progression."

He looks at his hands again and starts picking at his grubby nails.

"Yes. I am Compassion, who became Cole. I became Mercy who is also Cole for a while and I nearly became Despair who is also Cole, but I'm Compassion who is also Cole."

Ben doesn't understand the nuances of how a spirit could absorb a human's memories and emotions, but that is to be expected. He didn't grow up being taught about spirits and what they could do, and what they should (or apparently shouldn't) do. There had been Compassion (who possibly verged on Mercy and Despair - could spirits on their own shift between identities like that?) who became Cole or absorbed Cole, a human, while he was dying. And now, the Cole he's met is an imperfect mesh of the two. A combination that maybe wasn't meant to exist.

A small furrow forming between his dark brows, Ben asks:

"Is it still hard to be both? Like, are you - are you okay?"

Obviously the encounter with Despair had rattled them both, but Ben's question is clearly in reference to Cole's more general well-being, with reference to his identity. Ben has experienced maybe a hundredth of what Cole is talking about; he could hear the things on the other side of the portal whispering, could feel some bleedthrough of their thoughts and feelings while he was using his powers, and just after. He tries to imagine that, cranked up to 11.

"But you're not that." And Ben gestures in the way they'd come. "The thing we saw back there? You aren't that. Take my word for it."

"I am stable."

Cole and Compassion are an equilibrium. He exists, imperfect, but stable. Maybe much like most beings.

"I'm not Despair. But I could be. When people Despair, I Despair. I try to help before they feel that way." He hugs himself tightly, as though trying to curl up and hide under his silly hat. "I'm not. But I could be. You help. You care about people. Caring helps."

Stable isn't the same as doing well, but Ben's happy to hear that he's at least managing and found a way to live with the situation. It passes through his mind, a fleeting and involuntary thought, that his own situation with the creatures on the other side of the portal isn't dissimilar - stable, but not ideal. The best that can be hoped for.

From the sound of it, the identity of the spirit called Compassion is somewhat malleable, influenced by the people around it. Him? Pronouns are hard. But Ben focuses on what matters in this moment - that Cole could become Despair. That it's something he avoids actively. The potential is there, and he works against it.

And Ben might not be a spirit joined with a dying human, but he still feels compassion. So when Cole hugs himself like that, Ben does what he thinks might help: he reaches over and rubs his hand up and down Cole's spine, a soothing gesture that used to work wonders when he was still alive and Klaus was crying over some new awful thing that had happened to him.

"We all could be worse versions of ourselves. It's okay to be afraid of that, and- and to need help, steering you away from it, and reminding you of the you that you want to be."

Okay, maybe the consequences of someone like Cole letting himself become Despair are worse than if a normal human started behaving in a pattern they didn't mean to adopt. But Ben sees it as a question of severity, not difference.

"Is there anything else I can do? Like, to help, I mean..."

"Him," Cole agrees absently. "Cole was him." So It became Him.

And then Ben touches him and he stops, not flinching, but just completely lost. "You're... touching me."

It's not an accusation. It's more a question. Confusion.

Ah yes, the answering questions he had only been thinking in his mind is back. Now that he's braced for it, though, Ben doesn't actually mind. It makes things easier. 'Him' it is.

If only he had that kind of insight in return. Most of the time it would probably suck a lot to be able to tell what everyone is thinking and feeling. Ben isn't kidding himself that Cole's abilities are more blessing than curse. But it's still difficult, to know if he's messed up by touching Cole, especially when he reacts the way he does.

Ben stops rubbing Cole's back, but doesn't pull his hand away, yet.

"I- thought it might make you feel better."

Is that a gesture that doesn't translate across worlds, or had Cole really had so little of human comfort and affection in his life? He had said that he'd been through horrible things. Ben adds, quietly:

"Do you want me to stop?"

"Oh."

He's quiet a little longer. He can feel Ben's care and desire to help even without the touch of fingertips on him.

"It's been a long time since anyone touched me. Wanted to touch me."

Jove and Elise. They'd liked hugs and he'd done his best. And before that... The Chargers were somewhat tactile, if a bit rough. "I don't know how to respond to it. I don't think I want you to stop?"

Ben waits through that stretch of silence, uncertainty bubbling away under the surface. But even if this was a faux pas, and Cole tells him not to do it, Ben's awkwardness will have taken his mind off the nightmare they had both just witnessed. That is something, right? A small silver lining?

"Yeah?"

He wonders if it meant something different to people in Thedas, who lived in a world with spirits, to meet one like Cole. Did people avoid him - avoid touching him? It sounds like a lonely existence, to Ben. He's not even sure whether Cole feels loneliness the way that someone entirely human would...

"Doing this used to help. When my brother was hurt, or scared, or sad about something."

Probably Cole had already picked that up from his thoughts or emotions, but Ben says it anyway for good measure. He can't just assume that Cole is picking up on every little thing, and even if he did, Ben would feel weird not talking to him like a regular person.

"Okay." And he starts up again, rubbing those soothing circles into Cole's back. But he adds quietly, "If you change your mind that's cool too. It won't hurt my feelings. I just - thought that just because you're always trying to help other people who are hurting, there might not be anyone to do that for you. And that would suck."

Edited 2019-08-28 01:06 (UTC)

Cole almost answers about being alone. People didn't notice him, didn't remember him, he was always fairly alone and he did feel lonely sometimes, but he reminded himself he was helping and usually, the animals liked him.

But... that wouldn't help Ben. it would make him feel bad for Cole. So he doesn't say it.

"Dead faces, leering from the darkness, lurching and lumbering, KLAUS, help me, listen to me, they didn't understand they were scaring him, they were just desperate to not be alone with their dying thought." He tucks his legs up more to hug his thighs to his chest. "Helping people helps me. I know what I am when I can help. I'm not a demon."

Ben might be full of worry and sympathy and care for Cole right now, but that only extends so far; he is not Compassion and doesn't feel the same kind of all-encompassing and magnanimous care for the other ghosts that have tormented his brother his whole life. There were times when Ben wished Klaus would listen to them, work with them, use them to help himself, but that doesn't change the fact that they're partly responsible for why Klaus has always been so sad, so hounded, so unable to endure the real world.

That's the unfortunate thing about Cole's power; no hiding that skepticism, that lack of sadness over all those other ghosts. But he keeps rubbing Cole's back, even as he curls up tighter, and says, "But it's okay for you to need help, too, now and then. It doesn't change who or what you are."

And when Cole insists he isn't a demon, there's no hesitation before Ben says, "No, you're not." He might not know exactly what counts as a demon in Cole's world, but according to his definition of the word? No way. Not a chance.

Cole never expects others to hold the level of compassion he is. Ben's frustration and anger at his brother's hurt is not only understandable, it's natural.

"It's not what I'm meant to be like. I don't want to take anything someone else could use and need." He took Rhys' time and energy and maybe he had needed it then, but he wanted to give. "I want to give."

Ben has to think about that for a few moments. He has his own problems with the idea that there are roles allotted for people, a particular function that they must fulfill or else they aren't living up to some grand "supposed to". That had been how it was with the Academy. He was Number Six. He was meant to be a certain way, think a certain way, act a certain way. And he'd done his best to be those things his father had told him he needed to be. And all he had ended up was dead before he even had a chance to decide who he really was as a person.

But his experiences aren't universal and for all he knows, fitting within those categories is a good and fulfilling thing, for a spirit. Maybe it's only humans who chafe at being put into small boxes. He makes a soft 'hmm' noise in his throat and then says:

"I don't think it's true, to talk about it like being nice to you is taking something away from someone else. The way I look at it is like this... people don't have a certain amount of cruelty and a certain amount of kindness, and they spend it like money until they run out of each. If you act like a dick to one person, it makes it a little easier to act like a dick to somebody else the second time. So the opposite's true, and - letting people be compassionate to you helps them practice being compassionate so they have even more of it for whoever comes around after. Right?"

That was an awful lot of words in a row for Ben, and he says them with small pauses, fumbling for the correct words but convinced of the ideas behind them. He had seen it in action, the way kindness fostered more kindness, how it just took a little bit to get a chain reaction started.

"Besides... you do give. From what I've seen, anyway. You do. So- that's good!"

Spirits are what they are and being that and acting like that is everything for them (he's not just a spirit, he remembers fear and grief and resignation) and they try to inspire it in those around them.

"That's... true. When you're kind, people are kind back. Usually. Someone who feels kindness blossoms and gives that kindness out to others. But... they should be kind to other people and animals and... people aren't kind to spirits. We shouldn't be on this side, but I am. I don't know how I fit in with all that."

He looks up past the brim of his hat, big, pale eyes watching Ben. "Thank you. For your words. I know they're not easy."

"I shouldn't be alive but I am. I don't know how I fit into the world anymore, either."

It's not any new information that Cole doesn't already know, but Ben wants him to understand, if he can, that he's not alone in the way he feels. Not being sure what he is or where he belongs or even what he needs. Ben knows those feelings. And he thinks, even for a spirit, maybe it will help not to feel so different, so alone.

Even if people aren't usually kind to spirits, Ben is damn well going to be. He's made up his mind. So he smiles, when Cole thanks him for his words and acknowledges they are hard for him, and says:

"Anytime."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

august 2019. welcome to the void.

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